Former players ‘have lower risk of common mental health issues’

Former professional football players have a lower risk of admission to hospital for the most common mental health disorders than the general population, new research suggests.

Latest findings from the Football’s Influence on Lifelong health and Dementia risk (Field) study found that they were approximately half as likely to be admitted for anxiety and stressrelated disorders, depressive disorder, alcohol use disorders, drug use disorders, and bipolar and affective mood disorders.

It follows Field research last year which found that former professional footballers were approximately three-and-a-half times more likely to die from neurodegenerative disease than the general population.

The latest research looked at mental health outcomes in more than 7,500 former professional footballers and around 23,000 members of the general population, and is published in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry.

Consultant neuropathologist Dr Willie Stewart, honorary clinical associate professor at Glasgow University, who led the study, said: “This is the first and largest study to date to investigate the association between elite-level contact sport and risk of common mental health disorders after retirement.

“Our findings show that, despite former professional footballers having higher death from neurodegenerative disease, they are in fact approximately half as likely to be admitted to hospital with common mental health disorders.

“This 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.

“The results from Field would suggest this is not the case after all.”

Experts said that recent concerns over the risk of mental health disorder and suicide in former athletes have been driven, in part, by post-mortem studies reporting a specific degenerative brain pathology linked to brain injury.