Every year, millions of students throw on their helmets and shoulder pads and head to the football field. However, with recent studies linking head trauma and concussions caused by the high-contact sport to adverse health conditions, such as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), Alzheimer’s disease, and other neurodegenerative diseases later in life, the public perception of youth tackle football has declined — and so has its participation. Since 2006, the number of participants in tackle football in the United States has lessened, and polls have shown that more than half of Americans would not let their child play.
Sameer Deshpande an assistant professor of statistics, is using his field to tackle this fear, applying statistics to understand the long-term effects of playing football during childhood.
“I think the vast majority of us can agree that there is some inherent risk of playing tackle football — you’re running into people, you’re hitting your head on the ground and against others — so it’s not perfectly safe,” says Deshpande. “The question is understanding how risky it is.”
There are lots of studies that have aimed to understand the effects of head trauma and concussions caused by football, but Deshpande explains that many of these studies focus on college and professional athletes rather than children and teenagers who play the sport recreationally. As a result, there's limited information on how youth football affects child athletes in the future.
“Most people who play high school sports or high school football in particular don’t end up playing in college. And the majority of people who end up playing in college don’t play professionally,” explains Deshpande. “So, to what extent can we forecast what’s going to happen to say, somebody who played football in high school, but stopped? What's going to happen to their health 30-40 years down the line as compared to somebody who played for 10 years in the NFL?”
Deshpande, working with researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, has set out to answer this question. Deshpande’s current research is focused on identifying statistical methods that can be used to predict the long-term implications that young athletes will face. Due to the unprecedented nature of this sort of observational study, the method to answer this question doesn’t yet exist.
“There isn’t a method that you can take off the shelf and just apply it to a carefully collected data set to get the answer we want,” says Deshpande. “And so that's really where I spend most of my time is thinking about what sort of methods do we need to answer these sorts of societal and policy level questions?”
One method that Deshpande has explored involves The Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS), a study done here at UW-Madison that followed 10,317 men and women who graduated from Wisconsin high schools in 1957. The WLS collected data from respondents at varying times between 1957 and 2006, and studied variables such as social participation and background, psychological characteristics and family functioning. While this study has been hailed as the leading research on generalized aging, Deshpande explains how his team utilized this data in their research surrounding youth sports.
“We realized that with a really careful analysis, we can at least address this broader question of ‘what is the long-term effect of playing football, at least within this particular cohort, and we could try to characterize the effect on their health,” Deshpande explains.
While this study provides insight into the type of analysis that Deshpande hopes to accomplish, it’s only a starting point to answering the question of the risks of youth football today.
“This is obviously a very limited population and it doesn’t really generalize to students currently playing now, but it at least gives us a sense of people who are now in their 70’s and 80’s, and to what extent can we explain some of their health conditions based on what they did in high school,” he says.
As he continues to research methods to be used in this sort of study, Deshpande explains that his hope for the future is to not only present data on future implications, but to provide the information to families who are faced with the choice of allowing their children to participate in the sport.
“If everything goes right…I would really like to be able to say that based on a person’s background characteristics, we can forecast at what level of participation or intensity is safe,” he says. “We want families to make good decisions for themselves, and we would like it to be informed by good science.”
In 2021, Deshpande won the Significant Contributor Award from the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics in Sports, a group that promotes statistical research or applied statistical methods to sports data. The award is given to someone who has contributed in a significant way to the section.
This group, Deshpande explains, is passionate about the impact that statistics can have on varying aspects of sports such as using tracking data to prevent injuries on the basketball court. Deshpande says that he is hoping to build a similar community on the UW Campus.
“I think there's a lot of interest and a lot of opportunity in the students that I have met over the last year or so that I’ve been here,” he says. “I think this is going to be a real hotbed of this type of activity. I’m hoping to build up some of that community here.”