A study recently conducted and published in the journal Liver Transplantation has found that patients were up to three times more likely to survive a liver transplant if they had a “strong religious connection,” even if they didn’t attend church.
The study found that those who were actively “seeking God” had a better survival rate than those who did not hold religious beliefs, regardless of which faith they held.
This latest study adds weight to previous academic studies that illustrated how religion and faith can “influence disease progression”. Previous studies conducted by different researchers focusing on HIV, heart, as well as kidney dialysis patients have come to similar conclusions.
The leader of this study, Dr Franco Bonaguidi, said that patients with “high religious coping” who actively sought “God's help” and trusted their beliefs had a “more prolonged post-transplant survival than patients with low religiosity”.
“We found that an active search for God, (where) the patient's faith in a higher power rather than a generic destiny, had a positive impact on patient survival,” he added.
Bonaguidi said it was the “personal relationship between the patient and God, regardless of religious creed rather than formal church attendance that positively affected survival”.
Researchers focused the study on 179 liver transplant patients over a period of three years. Over that period, almost seven per cent of the actively "seeking-God" patients had died compared to more than a fifth of non religious believers.