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Associations between retirement reasons, chronic pain, athletic identity, and depressive symptoms among former professional footballers
journal contribution
posted on 2017-09-25, 14:08 authored by George Sanders, Clare StevinsonClare StevinsonBackground: Retirement from professional sport has been recognised as a major psychological stressor, and there is a need to identify factors that increase the risk of mental health problems after career termination. The current study examined associations between career-ending injury, chronic pain, athletic identity and depressive symptomology in retired professional footballers. Methods: A cross-sectional study was performed with 307 retired male footballers who had played within a professional United Kingdom league. Participants completed measures of depressive symptoms (Short Depression-Happiness Scale), chronic pain (Pain Intensity Numerical Rating Scale), and athletic identity (Athletic Identity Measurement Scale), and reported their reasons for retirement. Results: A total of 48 participants (16%) met the cut-off score for possible cases of clinically-relevant depression. These participants were more recently retired, and had higher athletic identity than those without depressive symptoms. Former players with depressive symptoms were more likely to cite injury as a retirement reason, and report higher levels of ongoing injury-related pain. Multivariate logistic regression revealed that presence of depressive symptoms was independently associated with retirement through injury (OR = 3.44; 95% CI = 1.39, 8.51), higher pain levels (OR = 1.38; 95% CI = 1.02, 1.86), and increased athletic identity (OR = 1.28; 95% CI = 1.14, 1.44). Conclusions: Career-ending injury is strongly associated with higher odds of depressive symptomology during retirement, while experiencing chronic pain, and maintaining a high sense of athletic identity, are additional potential contributors.
History
School
- Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences
Published in
European Journal of Sport ScienceVolume
17Issue
10Pages
1311-1318Citation
SANDERS, G. and STEVINSON, C., 2017. Associations between retirement reasons, chronic pain, athletic identity, and depressive symptoms among former professional footballers. European Journal of Sport Science, 17(10), pp. 1311-1318.Publisher
© European College of Sport Science. Published by Taylor & FrancisVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Acceptance date
2017-08-17Publication date
2017-09-14Notes
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in European Journal of Sport Science on 14 September 2017, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/17461391.2017.1371795.ISSN
1536-7290Publisher version
Language
- en