Former football players are around half as likely to be admitted to hospital for anxiety and stress related disorders, depression, drug and alcohol-use disorders, and bipolar and affective mood disorders.
They’re also no more likely to die by suicide than a control group, according to research involving data on more than 7,000 former professional football players.
There is growing awareness of the greater risk of neurodegenerative disease among contact sports players.
Among former professional football players, it is around three-and-a-half-fold higher than anticipated, the study states.
Mental health disorders and suicidality are also associated with traumatic brain injury.
But population data on contact sport and mental health outcomes up to now has been limited, state researchers in the paper, ‘Mental health and suicide in former professional soccer players’, published in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry.
The researchers, led by consultant neuropathologist and honorary clinical associate professor at the University of Glasgow Willie Stewart, argue that their findings support the need for a rethink of diagnostic clinical criteria for brain injury, particularly to include mental health outcomes.
These new findings, Stewart says, is important because: “In recent decades there have been suggestions that common mental health disorders and suicide are features of neurodegenerative disease in contact sports athletes. [These results] would suggest this is not the case after all.”
This paper is part of the Field study, ‘Football’s Influence on Lifelong health and Dementia risk’, which began in March 2018 and runs to February 2021.
