The question of whether football players are at higher risk of suicide than the general population has been raised in the popular and scientific literature. In 2012, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) published a paper primarily focused on death from heart disease among former National Football League (NFL) players (see related blog NFL Players Tackling Heart Disease). That study reported causes of death for multiple categories, including deaths from suicide.

NIOSH just published Suicide Mortality Among Retired National Football League Players Who Played 5 or More Seasons in the peer-reviewed American Journal of Sports Medicine. This paper provides updated suicide mortality data for the same group of retired professional football players including 6 additional years of data compared to the previous studies. The study evaluated the rates of death from suicide of 3,439 retired NFL players who played at least five seasons between 1959 and 1988. The study found that suicide deaths among this group were significantly less than would be expected when compared to the general U.S. population. We expected to see 25.6 deaths from suicide among the study group however, the actual number of suicide deaths found in the data was 12. The rates of death from suicide of the retired NFL players in our study was less than half of what would be expected when compared with the general U.S. population. In other words, the study found no increase in risk of suicide – and in fact a lower risk of suicide – among retired NFL players when compared with the general U.S. population.