WP22/16: The effect of playing high-level rugby on neurodegenerative conditions
Designation
Working Paper 2022/16
Proposed authors
Francesca Anns
Stephanie D’Souza
Barry Milne
Chao Li
Andrew Gardner
Ian Murphy
Susan Morton
Thomas Lumley
Ken Quarrie
Evert Verhagen
Concept
Rugby is a popular contact sport played by >8 million people globally. While the injury risk of playing rugby has been well-documented, the long-term health risks have not. There is an increasing awareness of the potential effects of concussion on neurodegenerative conditions, which raises concerns about the long term impacts of playing a collision-sport such as rugby.
“Kumanu Tāngata: The aftermatch project” aims to investigate the long-term health and social outcomes, e.g. mortality, neurodegenerative disease, cardiovascular disease, mental disorders, associated with playing professional rugby union. By linking anonymised player data to the Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI), we use a case-control design that involves matching players to demographically similar males in the population.
This paper will describe the effect of playing high-level rugby on neurodegenerative conditions, such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, Motor neurone diseases, and other dementias.
Data sources
We will use the following tables from the Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI):
- Life event data
- Person overseas spell
- Publicly funded hospital discharges
- Mortality data
- Rugby players data