Funded research will explore link between professional football and MND

New funding from My Name'5 Doddie Foundation, the MND Association and the Darby Rimmer MND Foundation will support a research project investigating the link between playing professional football and developing MND. The project will analyse death certificates from thousands of footballers in the UK and Italy to discover whether they had a higher risk of dying from MND than we would have expected.

Professor Ammar Al-Chalabi of King’s College London and Dr Elisabetta Pupillo of the Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research in Milan, Italy are leading the study.

Large studies, better data

MND is a rare disease, affecting around 5,000 people at any time in the UK. To determine whether a specific activity or profession increases your risk of developing MND, scientists must analyse a massive set of patient details. If they only looked at a small number of people, it might give biased results that make the risk seem greater or lesser than it really is. Studies of very rare diseases can also have different conclusions depending on the statistical tests used to analyse data.

A previously conducted study of professional footballers suggested that playing football professionally can increase your risk of MND sixfold, but other studies have shown that exercise might not increase risk, or might even be protective.

Death certificate analysis

Now, Professor Al-Chalabi and Dr Pupillo have designed a study that will ask the question again but with a bigger sample size. These replication studies are important for separating true scientific findings from statistical quirks that happen by chance. They have amassed data from footballers who played in Series A and B in Italy and those who were part of the Professional Football Association in the UK.

This dataset includes their date of birth, position, team, and playing career length. They have already accessed the death certificates of the Italian players in the cohort, but have only been able to estimate causes of death from Google for the 26,235 footballers who played in the UK.

To answer their questions scientifically, the team must access the UK players’ death certificates. This new funding will enable the team to access the certificates and complete their analysis.

Why is this study important?

Doddie was a passionate sportsperson and advocate for sport in general. However, if certain sports have risks, players and authorities must be aware so that safer ways of playing can be explored.

Professor Al-Chalabi said that the analysis may find no link between MND and professional football or even that playing the sport is protective against disease. Even if a link is discovered, Professor Al-Chalabi said that playing sports and exercising remains a beneficial activity to your health overall. “If we show it does increase the risk, even then we have to be very clear that the lifetime risk of MND is about one in 300. The risk of heart disease, stroke or cancer – which exercise protects against – is about one in three each. These are common and serious risks to your health; you need to exercise,” he explained.

Jessica Lee, Director of Research at My Name’5 Doddie Foundation said, “We are pleased to be co-funding this important project alongside the Darby Rimmer MND Foundation and the MND Association. Professor Al-Chalabi and Dr Pupillo’s work addresses a topic that we know many in our community have asked us about. Sports are beneficial to our bodies and minds, but people playing sports professionally and for fun deserve clarity on whether certain sports or ways of playing increase or decrease the risk of uncommon conditions like MND. By the end of this project, we will have a large and high-quality study to add to the existing evidence base on the interaction between football and MND.