High School Football and Adult Health

Obesity Clinical Trial

Official title:

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

Clinical Trial Details — Status: Completed

Administrative data

• NCT number: NCT03914573
• Other study ID #: 833020
• Status: Completed
• Start date: January 1957
• Est. completion date: December 2011

Study information

• Verified date: April 2019
• Source: University of Pennsylvania
• Contact: n/a
• Is FDA regulated: No
• Study type: Observational

Clinical Trial 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.

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.

Recruitment information / eligibility

• Status: Completed
• Enrollment: 3355
• Est. completion date: December 2011
• Est. primary completion date: December 2003
• Accepts healthy volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers
• Gender: Male
• Age group: N/A and older

Eligibility

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)

Related Conditions & MeSH terms

• Health Impairment
• Obesity
• Pain

Locations

Country	Name	City	State
United States	Massachusetts Institute of Technology	Cambridge	Massachusetts
United States	University of Pennsylvania	Philadelphia	Pennsylvania

Sponsors (2)

Lead Sponsor	Collaborator
University of Pennsylvania	Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Country where clinical trial is conducted

United States, 

Outcome

Type	Measure	Description	Time frame	Safety issue
Primary	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	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
Secondary	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
Secondary	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