Differences of frequencies of religious practices in a group of elderly octogenary in the federal district - Brazil

Aim: to investigate elderly octogenarians who declared themselves to be Catholic and Evangelical regarding sociodemographic aspects and health conditions, religious conping and the declared frequencies of private and public religious practices. Materials and methods: observational, correlational, descriptive, quantitative and qualitative cross-sectional study, carried out in the research project database “Patterns of cognitive and psychosocial physical aging in long-lived elderly people living in different contexts”. Data collection took place at the Geriatrics and Internal Medicine Outpatient Clinic of the Hospital of the Catholic University of Brasilia, between 2016-2018, with a sample of 150 elderly people aged 80 years or older, in a universe of 227 surveyed elderly people. The questionnaires contained questions about the sociodemographic profile: age; schooling; sex; marital status; family income; number of chronic diseases; self-rated health; that were correlated with religiosity / spirituality from the point of view of religious confession; attendance at private or public services and religious coping. The data were evaluated by inferential analysis of the Chi-Square test, with a significance level of p≤ 0.05. Results: Of the 150 long-lived elderly people evaluated, most were female (64.67%), with an average age of 84.62 ± 4.29 (80 and 101 years old). Regarding education, most had one to four years of study (41.33%). Regarding family income: the majority had three minimum wages or more (46.68%). Elderly with more than 3 diseases (54.67%). Regarding self-rated health: 49.33% of the elderly mentioned that they consider it to be regular. 56.66% elderly people believe that spirituality / religiosity give them the ability to face the adversities (religious coping) that life brings them, where the value of 0.006 was found, among those who practice the Catholic religion and those who practice the religion Evangelical. There was no correlation between the frequency of private (non-organizational) practices and religious confession, which did not happen in relation to the frequency of public (organizational) practices, since Evangelicals were more frequent in public practices than Catholics (value of p = 0.027). Discussion: other researchers found even higher frequencies for non-organizational religious than organizational practices, such as the one carried out by FIBRA + 80 in Campinas (SP). In another study carried out by the SABE Study, with elderly people living in the city of São Paulo (SP), aged 60 or over, the findings were similar to those of this research, with an association between sex and religious denomination. Conclusion: When starting the aging process, religiosity / spirituality can be a protective factor when the losses intensify (religious coping), because it can bring self-knowledge and inner peace. So that in old age, the experience of religiosity / spirituality tends to be more accentuated than among young people and adults, due to the fact that the elderly are more free from family responsibilities and other tasks. It is also noticed that religious affiliation is not necessarily related to religious practice, nor to fidelity to a single system of beliefs and practices. The limitations of the research were in the still small number of elderly people and in the instruments applied, which need to be adapted and more reliable to the oldest old.