What to do about heading?
November 1, 2019 1 Comment
Heading the ball — photo courtesy of Wikimedia
I have been meaning to write a blog post for over a week, since a bit of breaking sports medicine news occurred with the publication of some research in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).
It took a Tweet this morning to rouse me to action. I promise it hasn’t been sloth on my part that has slowed my hand, but pleading “I’m busy” to the group of folks who usually will be reading CJSM media is not going to gain much sympathy.
And yes, with fall sports, I sure have been busy. But I am sure you have too.
I hope, however, not too busy to have missed this piece of research from NEJM: “Neurodegenerative Disease Mortality Among Former Professional Soccer Players.” There was an accompanying editorial to this study, a piece that is most definitely worth a read too. “Soccer and Mortality — Good News and Bad News”
The published research was a large retrospective cohort study looking at former professional Scottish football (soccer) players: 7676 cases were identified from databases of Scottish football players and 23,028 controls (3:1) from the ‘general population’ were identified using a Scottish ‘Community Health Index.’ Controls were matched to players on the basis of sex, age, and degree of social deprivation. Of note, all the participants in this study were male.The researchers looked at two dependent outcome variables: i) cause of death as noted on death certificates and ii) dispensed medications, information for which was obtained from the Scottish national Prescribing Information System. Follow up information for study participants was for a median of 18 years (for each individual, “Age was used as the time covariate, with follow-up from age 40 years to the date of data censoring, which was either the date of death or the end of the follow up (December 31, 2016), whichever occurred first).”
The researchers report several important findings in this study, to note just a few:
