New App Tackles Football Players' Health

UPDATED: April 1, 2016, at 2:25 p.m.

A Harvard team dedicated to studying football players' health recently launched an iPhone app to facilitate the collection of data from former players.

In order to improve treatment strategies for common conditions among football players, the research group—called the Football Players Health Study—launched the TeamStudy app in order to allow surveying larger numbers of participants. The researchers will be able to compare data from former professional players against a control group consisting of members of the general public.

By prompting users to answer basic questions about their health and perform simple tasks, the app captures important details about players’ day-to-day experiences that a questionnaire might overlook, according to Alvaro Pascual-Leone, principal investigator of the study and a Harvard Medical School professor.

“By the nature of a questionnaire, you end up collecting information based on what they share, what they are telling us. We want to go beyond that,” Pascual-Leone said. “The TeamStudy app will capture aspects of day-to-day life, how people are actually performing, how quickly they are walking, what their heart rates are.”

The researchers hope that TeamStudy, available for free download in the App Store, will generate greater insight into areas like cognition, cardiac health, balance, and mobility. The app was designed with input from former football players who communicated their health concerns to the researchers.

“We want to make sure that the things we focus on are really key things for the players,” said Pascual-Leone. “So from the very beginning, we set up a group of former players who are involved in guiding all aspects of the whole initiative.”

The Football Players Health Study, which consists of researchers from multiple Harvard schools, is the largest study of former professional football players to date. Since its launch in 2014, the study has surveyed more than 2,800 participants.

With the launch of TeamStudy, the researchers hope they will be able to reach much larger numbers of players in order to generate more significant data.

“If you think about the number of people that have been hired by professional football teams in the NFL from 1960 to today, there should be around 14,000 former players,” Pascual-Leone said. “We’re hoping to engage as many of them as possible. The larger the number, the more important and relevant the results will be.”

The potential health risks associated with playing professional football have become an increasingly important area of study for the medical community in general, according to Frank Wang, head team physician for Harvard Athletics.

“There are a number of health concerns that can be associated with professional football players, including more neurologic issues such as depression, cognitive decline, and questions of chronic traumatic encephalopathy,” Wang said. “As more information becomes available, sports medicine professionals have become more cognizant of concussion and head trauma.”