Suicide and depression in former contact sports participants (Batty et al., 2023)

The medical question

Which mental-health needs require better recognition and support for fighters?

The Fight Medicine Research Institute uses this evidence to frame questions about a fighter’s psychological health, access to support and health after competition. The study’s population and assessment methods determine which questions it can inform.

Summary

The study linked retired athletes to health and mortality registries and reviewed cohort evidence on depression and suicide, including results for former amateur boxers.

Scope: Broader contact-sports population. The cohort includes former amateur boxers as one subgroup, alongside wrestlers and soccer players. The pooled analysis concerns soccer and American football.

What the abstract reports

2,004 retired Finnish male athletes who had competed internationally as amateurs and 1,385 general-population controls were linked to hospital and death registries.
Former boxers did not have statistically higher rates of major depressive disorder or suicide than controls (depression hazard ratio 1.43, 95% CI 0.73 to 2.78; suicide hazard ratio 1.75, 95% CI 0.64 to 4.38).
Seven other cohort studies were pooled with the Finnish data. The pooled results reported in the abstract concern soccer and American football.

Publication status and notices

Published in a peer-reviewed journal. Population cohort study plus systematic review and meta-analysis in eClinicalMedicine. PubMed publication type: Journal Article.

No correction, retraction or expression of concern was found in PubMed, Crossref or Scite when this record was checked.

Fight Medicine Research Institute contribution

Fight Medicine Research Institute selected and catalogued this study, prepared an original research summary, verified its bibliographic details, and maintains the associated citation record.

Article details

Relationship: External research catalogued by the Fight Medicine Research Institute. The original authors, journal and DOI are unchanged.
Published online: No online date in the publisher’s Crossref deposit
Issue date: June 2023, volume 60
Repository date: 8 June 2023 (Europe PMC first-publication date)
Date used here: 8 June 2023 (Europe PMC first-publication date)
Rights: CC BY 4.0. Open access under a Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY 4.0), as recorded by Europe PMC and the licence link in the source record. The summary on this page is Fight Medicine Research Institute’s own wording. No abstract text, figure or table from the article is reproduced here. Licence terms.
Source check: 9 November 2026, against PubMed (NCBI), Crossref, Europe PMC and Scite. 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: See the source record for the authors’ funding and disclosures.
Catalog: FH-031, added 9 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.

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