Comprehensive health assessment of retired martial arts athletes

The medical question

How does a fighter’s health change in the years after competition ends?

The Fight Medicine Research Institute uses this evidence to frame questions about a fighter’s bone health, body weight, diet, sleep and stress after retirement. The study’s population and assessment methods determine which questions it can inform.

Summary

Compared with 20 non-athletes of the same age, 30 retired male martial arts athletes had higher bone density scores, had gained more weight and reported more stress, and did not differ significantly in insomnia, happiness or quality of life scores.

What the work reports

• Thirty retired Jordanian male elite martial arts athletes and 20 male non-athletes, all aged 40 to 50, had bone density and body composition scans, kept a 3-day food record and completed questionnaires on physical activity, quality of life, happiness, stress and insomnia.
• Retired athletes had higher mean bone density Z-scores at the neck of the left femur (0.32 against -0.56) and the lumbar spine (-0.15 against -1.15), and a larger mean weight gain (18.55 kg since their last competition, against 4.3 kg over 10 years in non-athletes). Their mean perceived stress score was higher (2.36 against 2.15), while insomnia, happiness and quality of life scores did not differ significantly.
• The authors conclude that retired elite athletes keep better bone density but face greater weight gain and stress than non-athletes, and that both groups had a good quality of life and low levels of insomnia.

Limits to keep in mind

• The study used a small convenience sample of 30 retired athletes and 20 non-athletes, all Jordanian men aged 40 to 50, and the authors note that the results might not be generalizable to a larger population.
• Each person was measured once, so the study shows differences between the groups and cannot show that a sports career caused them.
• Weight gain was calculated from different starting points: the competition weight category for athletes and the weight 10 years earlier for non-athletes.
• The authors note that the sample was too small to study each martial art separately and that self-reported data are open to recall bias and social desirability bias.

Source issues recorded

• For the total Z-score of the left femur, the text gives the non-athletes’ mean as 0.279 and Table 3 gives -0.29. The article reports a p-value of 0.047 for this comparison and also a confidence interval that runs from -0.539 to 0.537. This record gives no figures for that comparison.
• The discussion and conclusion describe bone mineral content as higher in retired athletes. Table 3 gives 3.19 against 2.99 with a p-value of 0.08, above the article’s threshold of 0.05.
• The article gives the non-athletes’ mean weight gain as 4.3 kg. The mean weights it reports differ by 4.2 kg (90.3 kg now and 86.10 kg ten years earlier). This record gives the figure the article states.

Publication status and notices

Published in Frontiers in Aging, a peer-reviewed journal. Original research article in Frontiers in Aging.

Form of this work: Version of record. The version of record is the final article as issued by its publisher.

No correction or retraction notice was found in Crossref or Europe PMC when this record was checked.

Fight Medicine Research Institute contribution

Fight Medicine Research Institute selected and catalogued this study, prepared an original research summary and a narrative review, verified its bibliographic details, and maintains the associated citation record. It holds an unmodified copy of the published article under the article’s licence.

PDF files

Article details

Relationship

External research catalogued by the Fight Medicine Research Institute. The original authors, journal and DOI are unchanged.

Published online

3 February 2025

Repository date

3 February 2025 (Europe PMC first-publication date)

Date used here

3 February 2025 (Crossref publisher deposit, online publication date)

Rights

CC BY 4.0. Open access under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY), as stated by the publisher. The summary on this page is Fight Medicine Research Institute’s own wording. An unmodified copy of the published article is held on this website under this licence. Licence terms.

Source check

12 November 2026, against PubMed Central full text, Crossref and Europe PMC. Checked under the direction of Casey C. Sears, Founder. An LLM was utilized as a research tool with direct human oversight.

Appraisal

The check covered bibliographic details, links, licence and notices. It is not a formal critical appraisal of the full paper.

Clinical review

None. This record is a research summary, not clinical education.

Funding and conflicts

The article states that the research was supported by the School of Graduate Studies and funded by the Research Deanship at the University of Jordan (decision no. 25713). The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Catalog

FH-037, added 12 November 2026

Cite the original work

These files cite the work by its own authors, journal and DOI. Fight Medicine Research Institute appears only in a note, as curator of this catalog page.

Tasneem Alshaer, Nihad Battikhi, Adam Tawfiq Amawi, Khalid Trabelsi, Haitham Jahrami, Philippe Bouedo, et al.. Comprehensive health assessment of retired martial arts athletes: bone density, dietary intake, physical activity, and wellbeing. Frontiers in Aging. 2025;6:1513936. https://doi.org/10.3389/fragi.2025.1513936

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Related on this website

• Research priority: Suicide prevention and life after competition
• Fighter Health: Sleep and life after competition