High School Football and Adult Health

Study Overview
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Brief Summary
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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
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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.

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

Conditions
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Health Impairment, Pain, Obesity

Participation Criteria
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Eligibility Criteria
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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)
Sexes Eligible for Study
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Male

Accepts Healthy Volunteers
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Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Study Plan
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How is the study designed?
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What is the study measuring?
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Primary Outcome Measures

| Outcome Measure | Measure Description | Time Frame |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Self-rated Health | 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 | Collected in 2003-2005 when participants were aged 65 | 

Secondary Outcome Measures

| Outcome Measure | Measure Description | Time Frame |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Pain that limits activities | 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. | Collected in 2003-2005 when participants were aged 65 | 
| Difficulty in Activities of Daily Living | 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. | Collected in 2003-2005 when participants were aged 65 | 
| Maximum Lifetime Body Mass Index | 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. | Collected in the WLS mail survey in 2004 | 

 Terms related to the study
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Keywords Provided by Centre Hospitalier Valida
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health, football, pain, obesity