Thirty-four percent of former professional football players believe they have chronic traumatic encephalopathy, with those participants showing a twofold increased risk of suicidality compared with their peers, according to a recent study.
In the cross-sectional study, published in JAMA Neurology, investigators examined the prevalence of perceived chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and its association with suicidality among former professional American-style football (ASF) players. Conducted as part of the Football Players Health Study at Harvard University, the study analyzed the data of 1,980 former players who completed surveys between 2017 and 2020.
Among the participants, 34% (n = 681) of them reported perceiving themselves to have CTE, despite its diagnosis requiring postmortem neuropathologic examination.
Among the players with perceived CTE, 25.4% (n = 171/681) of them reported experiencing suicidal thoughts compared with 5.0% (n = 64/1,299) of those without perceived CTE. After adjusting for confounding variables such as depression, perceived CTE was associated with a more than twofold increased risk of suicidality (odds ratio [OR] = 2.06, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.36–3.12, P < .001).
The investigators found that the players with perceived CTE were more likely to report several health concerns, including cognitive impairment, depression, emotional and behavioral dysregulation, chronic pain, and low testosterone levels. Perceived CTE was linked to specific conditions such as subjective cognitive difficulties (OR per 1 standard deviation [SD] unit = 1.91, 95% CI = 1.58–2.31), low testosterone levels (OR = 1.42, 95% CI = 1.04–1.94), concussion-related symptoms (OR per SD unit = 1.34, 95% CI = 1.18–1.53), and pain intensity (OR = 1.11, 95% CI = 1.04–1.19). Older age (OR per SD unit = 0.97, 95% CI = 0.96–0.98, P < .001) was associated with a lower risk of perceived CTE.
The findings suggested that perceived CTE, as CTE is currently only diagnosable postmortem, may be associated with mental health outcomes, particularly suicidality, among former professional ASF players.
Full disclosures can be found in the published study.