Higher dementia risk for former professional footballers

Sheffield United's Lys Mousset (left) in action with Arsenal's Sokratis Papastathopoulos in the two teams' recent Premier League match-up. Research has found that retired footballers are generally healthier than non-footballers, except when it comes to dementia-related diseases. — Reuters

A landmark study led by the University of Glasgow in the United Kingdom has revealed the first major insights into lifelong health outcomes in former professional footballers.

In findings published Oct 21, 2019, in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers compared the causes of death of 7,676 former Scottish male professional football players who were born between 1900 and 1976 against those of more than 23,000 matched individuals from the general population.

Led by consultant neuropathologist Dr Willie Stewart, honorary clinical associate professor at the University of Glasgow, the FIELD study found that former professional footballers had an approximately three and a half times higher rate of death due to neurodegenerative disease than expected.

Said Dr Stewart: "This is the largest study to date looking in this detail at the incidence of neurodegenerative disease in any sport, not just professional footballers.

"A strength of our study design is that we could look in detail at rates of different neurodegenerative disease subtypes.

"This analysis revealed that risk ranged from a five-fold increase in Alzheimer’s disease, through an approximately four-fold increase in motor neurone disease to a two-fold increase in Parkinson’s disease in former professional footballers, compared to population controls.”

Although footballers had higher risk of death from neurodegenerative disease, they were less likely to die of other common diseases, such as heart disease and some cancers, including lung cancer.

Reflecting these findings, the study found that deaths in former footballers were lower than expected up to age 70, and higher than expected over that age.

Dr Stewart said: "An important aspect of this work has been the ability to look across a range of health outcomes in former professional footballers.

"This allows us to build a more complete picture of health in this population.

"Our data show that while former footballers had higher dementia rates, they had lower rates of death due to other major diseases.

"As such, whilst every effort must be made to identify the factors contributing to the increased risk of neurodegenerative disease to allow this risk to be reduced, there are also wider potential health benefits of playing football to be considered.”

The association between contact sport participation and neurodegenerative disease has been subject to debate in recent years.

Post-mortem studies have identified a specific dementia pathology linked to exposure to brain injury, known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, in a high proportion of brains of former contact sports athletes, including former footballers, in parallel studies led by Dr Stewart.

However, until this study, it was not clear whether there was any evidence of an increase in neurodegenerative disease rate in former footballers.

The FIELD study is funded by the UK Football Association and the UK Professional Footballers’ Association.