Religion and the Survival of 1010 Hospitalized Veterans

Objective: To examine the effects of religious affiliation and religious coping on survival of acutely-hospitalized medically-ill male veterans following discharge. Sample and Methods: Between 1987 and 1989, comprehensive psychosocial and physical-health evaluations were performed on a consecutive sample of 1010 patients ages 20–39 and 65–102 years admitted to the general medicine and neurology services of the Veterans Administration (VA) Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina. Religious affiliation and religious coping (the degree to which a patient relied on his religious faith for comfort and strength) were among the variables assessed. Subjects or surviving family members were contacted by telephone in 1996–97 to determine vital status; dates of death were confirmed by the Veterans Administration's Beneficiary Identification and Records Locator Subsystem (BIRLS), death certificate, or the National Death Index. Cox proportional-hazards regression was used to model the effects of religious variables on time to death, controlling for demographic, social, psychiatric, and physical-health covariates. Results: Follow-up was obtained on all 1010 patients. During the observation period, 673 patients died. While a higher proportion of conservative Protestants than members of other religious groups died during this time (70.5% vs. 64.3%, p = .04), the association disappeared once covariates were controlled. Religious coping was unrelated to survival in both bivariate and multivariate analyses (hazard ratio 1.00, 95% CI 0.99–1.01). Conclusions: Neither religious affiliation nor dependence on religion as a coping behavior predicted survival in this sample of medically-ill male veterans. Several reasons for the absence of an effect are explored, notably the fact that the mortality force exerted by age, medical diagnosis, and severity of physical-health problems overwhelmed the weaker effects of psychosocial variables.     

Failure to replicate a QTL association between a DNA marker identified by EST00083 and IQ

In a paper published in this journal, a possible QTL association was reported between general cognitive ability and a marker, identified by an expressed sequence tag, EST00083 (Skuder et al., 1995). In two small samples, the frequency of the common allele of this DNA marker, which was shown to be in the threonine transfer RNA gene in mitochondrial DNA, was significantly greater in a high-IQ group than in a low-IQ group. As part of the ongoing IQ QTL Project (Plomin et al., 1995), we have attempted to replicate this QTL association. First, we found that the QTL association remained significant when we compared 51 high- and 51 -average IQ subjects, drawn in part from the samples used in the previous report. However, when we examined the association in new samples of 40 extremely high-IQ subjects and 50 average-IQ subjects, the association did not replicate. This underlies the need for replication in case-control studies of allelic association.     

An empirical study of the factor analysis stability hypothesis

Note is taken of four related sources of confusion as to the usefulness of Thurstone's factor analysis model and of their resolutions. One resolution uses Tucker's distinction between exploratory and confirmatory analyses. Eight analyses of two sets of data demonstrate the procedures and results of a confirmatory study with statistical tests of some, but not all, relevant hypotheses in an investigation of the stability (invariance) hypothesis. The empirical results provide estimates, as substitutes for unavailable sampling formulations, of effects of variation in diagonal values, in method of factoring, and in samples of cases. Implications of these results are discussed.The computational costs of this study were defrayed, in part, by a research small grant M-1922 from the National Institute of Health, and, in part, by support under project 176-0002 by the University of Iowa Computing Center, Dr. J. P. Dolch, Director. The assistance of Dr. Kern Dickman and Mr. Leonard Wevrick of the University of Illinois and of Mr. Norman Luther of the University of Iowa in handling the computing problems is gratefully acknowledged.