Want to Increase Your Chances of Living Longer? Go to a Museum, Says a New Study

We should all be getting more
exposure to the arts, claims a medical study published yesterday in
the British Medical
Journal. Just one
exhibition a year could add years to our lives. 

A team of researchers from the
University College London surveyed 6,710 adults in England, aged 50
or older, to test whether a correlation exists between arts
engagement and mortality. The longitudinal study tracked how often
participants went to museums, art galleries, exhibitions, theater
performances, concerts, or the opera.

They found that even those who
had what was classified as infrequent arts activity (going to maybe
one or two cultural events a year) had a 14 percent lower risk of
early mortality. And the more often the study’s participants went
on cultural outings, the better: those who attended art activities
on a more regular basis (every few months or more) had a 31 percent
lower risk of early death.

This study is part of a wave of
recent research connecting access to the arts to improved health.
Studies over the past decade in Denmark and Britain have linked the
presence of artwork in
hospitals with improved
patient satisfaction and positive health outcomes. And last year
the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts piloted an initiative where
doctors could
prescribe health-enhancing museum visits to patients through the Canadian healthcare
system, granting patients and their caregivers free admission to
the museum.

The study published this week
did also take socioeconomic factors into account, admitting that
longevity may be linked to the higher socioeconomic status of the
demographic that usually goes to museums, exhibitions, and art
galleries. “Part of the association is attributable to differences
in socioeconomic status among those who do and do not engage in the
arts, which aligns with research that suggests engagement in
cultural activities is socially patterned,” the study
said.

Still, some of the statistical
correlation between cultural engagement and longevity was found to
be independent of socioeconomic factors. Simply put, the study
concludes that “our results suggest that cultural engagement is
associated with longevity.”

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to a Museum, Says a New Study appeared first on artnet
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