High School Football and Adult Health

Completed

Brief Summary: The primary aim of the study is to determine the effect of playing high school football on self-rated health in late adulthood. This is an observational study that will use data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, a longitudinal cohort of high school graduates from 1957, to compare graduates who played high school football with comparable graduates who did not play football on self-rated health, pain, functional ability, and weight at the age of 65 years.

Detailed Description: Data will be used from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS), a long-term study of a random sample of 10,317 men and women who graduated from Wisconsin high schools in 1957 to determine the association between participation in high-school football and self-rated health, pain, and obesity in late adulthood. The WLS is an optimal observational dataset to answer these hypotheses. WLS captures early-life exposures that are important predictors of health and well-being in later life such parental socioeconomic status, occupation, and education level, family structure, and race. It also captures whether study participants participated in high school football and contains detailed measurements of their health in adulthood. WLS provides a robust and longitudinal dataset, overcoming the limitations of prior cross-sectional studies, to compare the health in later adulthood of those who played high school football to those who did not, after carefully controlling for a potential confounders

A matched observational study will be conducted, in which football players and controls will be divided into smaller subgroups which are relatively homogeneous along a range of baseline covariates. The outcomes will be compared within each matched set, after adjusting for residual imbalances in the distribution of these baseline covariates between the football players and controls.

Recruitment & Eligibility

Inclusion Criteria

• Male

Exclusion Criteria

No yearbook information available to determine football playing status
Sports participation in yearbook was not recorded under senior photo or in an index
Played a high contact sport other than football (e.g. hockey)

Primary Outcome Measures

Name	Time	Method
Self-rated Health	Collected in 2003-2005 when participants were aged 65	Subjects reported whether their health was excellent, very good, good, fair, or poor. We dichotomized subjects' responses, coding "excellent", "very good", and "good" as 0 and coding "fair" and "poor" as 1

Secondary Outcome Measures

Name	Time	Method
Pain that limits activities	Collected in 2003-2005 when participants were aged 65	Subjects reported whether during the past 4 weeks, how many of their activities were limited by pain or discomfort. We coded subject responses as 1 if they responded that some, most, or all of their activities were limited and 0 if they responded that none or a few activities were limited.
Difficulty in Activities of Daily Living	Collected in 2003-2005 when participants were aged 65	Subjects reported whether during the past 4 weeks, have they been able to eat, bathe, dress and use the toilet without difficulty. We coded 0 for no difficulty and 1 for any difficulty.
Maximum Lifetime Body Mass Index	Collected in the WLS mail survey in 2004	Subjects reported their maximum lifetime weight and the age at which they weighed the most. From these responses, we computed the maximum adult BMI for each subject who reported that they reached their maximum weight when they were 18 years old or older.

Locations (2): Massachusetts Institute of Technology
🇺🇸
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
University of Pennsylvania
🇺🇸
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States

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