WP22/14: The health effect of playing high-level rugby: Study protocol
Designation
Working Paper 2022/14
Proposed authors
Stephanie D’Souza
Barry Milne
Chao Li
Andrew Gardner
Ian Murphy
Susan Morton
Thomas Lumley
Ken Quarrie
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 mental health and 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 project is the first to use nationwide administrative data to explore longitudinal health outcomes in rugby players, giving New Zealand and World Rugby important evidence of the long-term risks involved in the sport.
This paper will describe the study protocol, including the rationale, methods and analysis, for the Kumanu Tāngata project.
Data sources
None – this protocol will describe the analyses that are to be undertaken.