Patients who draw on religion to cope with their illness are more likely to receive intensive, life-prolonging medical care as death approaches. And this treatment often entails a lower quality of life in patients' final days, says the senior author of the study, Dr Holly Prigerson, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

The study involved 345 advanced cancer patients at seven hospital and cancer centres around the country. "Positive religious copers" had nearly three times the odds of receiving life-prolonging care, in the form of being on a ventilator or receiving cardiopulmonary resuscitation, in the final week of life. They were also less likely to have completed advance medical directives, such as a living will or a do-not-resuscitate order, which can limit the extent of such interventions in advance.

The New York Times pragmatically pointed out that a religious approach to death costs taxpayers more: "Aggressive life-prolonging care comes at a cost, however, in terms of both dollars and human suffering. Medicare, the government’s health plan for the elderly, spends about one-third of its budget on people who are in the last year of life, and much of that on patients at the very end of life." ~ New York Times, Mar 17; Science Daily, Mar 17