When we talk about the damage American football does to the human brain, we tend to focus on retired NFL players, players who were in the game for years, often from childhood, and retired somewhere in their late 20s to early 30s. A new study published in JAMA Network Open suggests it’s not so much the years of playing football as much as it is the mileage.
Researchers from Boston University analyzed data from 3970 former football players enrolled in the head impact and trauma surveillance study. The men, who averaged around 56 years old, were tasked with completing 90 minutes of computer-based cognitive tests and mental health questionnaires that measured memory, executive function, and depression.
They crunched the numbers and the results showed a clear pattern suggesting that the longer someone played football, and the higher level they reached, the worse their scores tended to be. A subset of 661 former players was directly compared to 282 men of similar age, race, ethnicity, and education who had never experienced the kind of repeated blows to the head that football players experience nearly every time they take the field. Former players scored lower on memory tests, had more daily cognitive difficulties, and had higher rates of depressive symptoms on the Geriatric Depression Scale. The statistical differences were loud and obvious.
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Former professional players had the worst scores, followed by players who topped out in college, and then followed by guys would only played in high school and in youth leagues. The position they played didn’t matter much, nor did the age at which they started playing. What mattered most was cumulative exposure, or, again, to steal a line from Indiana Jones, it’s not the years, it’s the mileage. The level of competition also factored in.
That’s an important detail since most men who’ve played football competitively never made it to the NFL. Since most research had been focused almost squarely on NFL players, there was a huge gap in the data. The mental health and cognitive functions of anyone who topped out at any point before going pro hadn’t been accounted for until now.
This was an observational study, so correlation does not equal causation. It was also largely made up of men who may have already been experiencing some of these symptoms. Regardless, it’s still significant that these patterns held across thousands of participants.
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