High School Football and Adult Health

Sponsor

University of Pennsylvania (Other)

Overall Status

Completed

CT.gov ID

NCT03914573

Collaborator

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Other)

3,355

Enrollment

Locations

659

Actual Duration (Months)

1677.5

Patients Per Site

2.5

Patients Per Site Per Month

Study Details

Study Description

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.

Condition or Disease	Intervention/Treatment	Phase
Health Impairment Pain Obesity

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.

Study Design

Study Type:

Observational

Actual Enrollment :

3355 participants

Observational Model:

Cohort

Time Perspective:

Retrospective

Official Title:

Observational Study of the Association of Participation in High School Football on Health in Late Adulthood

Actual Study Start Date :

Jan 1, 1957

Actual Primary Completion Date :

Dec 1, 2003

Actual Study Completion Date :

Dec 1, 2011

Outcome Measures

Primary Outcome Measures

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

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.

Eligibility Criteria

Criteria

Ages Eligible for Study:

N/A and Older

Sexes Eligible for Study:

Male

Accepts Healthy Volunteers:

Yes

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)

Contacts and Locations

Locations

	Site	City	State	Country	Postal Code
1	Massachusetts Institute of Technology	Cambridge	Massachusetts	United States	02139
2	University of Pennsylvania	Philadelphia	Pennsylvania	United States	19104

Sponsors and Collaborators

University of Pennsylvania
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Investigators

Principal Investigator: Timothy Gaulton, MD, University of Pennsylvania
Principal Investigator: Sameer Deshpande, PhD, Massachusetts Insitute of Technology
Principal Investigator: Dylan Small, PhD, University of Pennsylvania
Principal Investigator: Mark D Neuman, MD, University of Pennsylvania