ArticleCureus2026
Spiritual Complementary and Alternative Medicine Practices, Health-Related Behaviors, and Mortality Among US Adults: A National Health Interview Survey-Based Cohort Study.
Article in Cureus, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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Abstract
Background Relatively few studies have examined population-level impacts of spiritual practices on health. The National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) asks adults about spiritual practices for their own health in a complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) module roughly every five years. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) linked 1986 to 2018 surveys to the National Death Index. Objective Study objectives are to 1) compare spiritual practices as asked within CAM modules to mortality by the end of 2019, adjusting for respondent characteristics; 2) identify how health behaviors changed over time, particularly with regards to spiritual practices; and 3) explore significant interaction effects of spiritual practices in relation to mortality. Methods As three different spiritual practices were asked across 1999, 2002, 2007, 2012, and 2017, we ran survey-adjusted bivariate Chi-square tests of health behaviors by spiritual practice (yes/no) by grouping of years. Guided by the Andersen Behavioral Model, we included many socio-demographics, health status, and health behavior variables in a fully saturated, survey-adjusted Cox proportional hazards regression with mortality (yes/no) as the dependent variable and age at survey as the time variable. Due to top-coding at 85 years, analysis was limited to 18-84 years of age. A follow-up regression included interaction terms of spiritual practices with respondent characteristics. We also ran a sensitivity analysis to assess potential bias due to missing data. Results Among adults (n=137,291), 11.51% had died by the end of 2019. In 1999, an estimated 27.0 million adults (13.7% of adults that year) reported usingspiritual healing/prayer for their own health. In 2002 and 2007, an estimated 92.6 million adults annually (43.9% of adults) reported praying for your own health
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