Clinical trial NCT03914573: High School Football and Adult Health
Official title: Observational Study of the Association of Participation in High School Football on Health in Late Adulthood
Study type: OBSERVATIONAL
Overall status: COMPLETED
Conditions: Health Impairment
Pain
Obesity
Keywords: health
football
pain
obesity
Lead sponsor: University of Pennsylvania
Sponsor class: OTHER
Collaborators: name: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
First posted: 2019-04-16
Enrollment: 3355
Sex: MALE
Standard ages: CHILD
ADULT
OLDER_ADULT
Accepts healthy volunteers: yes
Observational model: COHORT
Time perspective: RETROSPECTIVE
Sampling method: PROBABILITY_SAMPLE
Study population: Graduates of Wisconsin high schools in 1957. The data comes 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.

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.

Eligibility criteria: 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 outcomes:
measure: Self-rated Health
timeFrame: Collected in 2003-2005 when participants were aged 65
Secondary outcomes:
measure: Pain that limits activities
timeFrame: Collected in 2003-2005 when participants were aged 65
measure: Difficulty in Activities of Daily Living
timeFrame: Collected in 2003-2005 when participants were aged 65
measure: Maximum Lifetime Body Mass Index
timeFrame: Collected in the WLS mail survey in 2004
Other outcomes:
Locations:
city: Cambridge
country: United States
facility: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
state: Massachusetts
city: Philadelphia
country: United States
facility: University of Pennsylvania
state: Pennsylvania
Study officials:
affiliation: University of Pennsylvania
name: Timothy Gaulton, MD
role: PRINCIPAL_INVESTIGATOR
affiliation: Massachusetts Insitute of Technology
name: Sameer Deshpande, PhD
role: PRINCIPAL_INVESTIGATOR
affiliation: University of Pennsylvania
name: Dylan Small, PhD
role: PRINCIPAL_INVESTIGATOR
affiliation: University of Pennsylvania
name: Mark D Neuman, MD
role: PRINCIPAL_INVESTIGATOR
References: