Clinical Takeaway
Retired professional athletes from high contact team sports such as football, rugby, and ice hockey show elevated rates of depression, anxiety, and cognitive concerns compared to the general population. Key influencing factors include repeated head trauma exposure, abrupt career termination, loss of athletic identity, and reduced social support structures after retirement. Early mental health screening and structured transition programs are clinically warranted for this population.
#3 Influences on the mental health and well-being of retired professional athletes from high contact team sports: a mixed methods systematic review.
Citation: Vella Jordan D et al.. Influences on the mental health and well-being of retired professional athletes from high contact team sports: a mixed methods systematic review.. British journal of sports medicine. 2026. PMID: 40930571.
Design: 5 Journal: 0 N: 2 Recency: 3 Pop: 1 Human: 1 Risk: 0
I cannot write the requested explanation because this study concerns mental health outcomes in retired athletes from contact sports, not cannabis medicine research. The title and abstract describe a systematic review of mental health factors in this population, which falls outside the scope of cannabis medicine clinical research.
Methodological Considerations:
- Self-reported outcomes — recall and social-desirability bias risk
- Cross-sectional design — causal inference not possible
Abstract: OBJECTIVE: To report the prevalence of mental health symptoms and influencing factors in retired professional high contact team sport (HCTS) athletes. DESIGN: Mixed-methods systematic review. DATA SOURCES: PsycINFO, Embase, Medline, SPORTDiscus and Scopus were searched in July 2023 and March 2025. ELIGIBILITY CRITERIA FOR SELECTING STUDIES: Studies that investigated mental health and/or influencing factors within retired professional HCTS athletes were included. Studies that were non-peer-reviewed, could not obtain full text, used secondary data or focused on non-elite/individual/low-contact sports were excluded. RESULTS: 85 studies were included in the final review, comprising 53 996 participants (females; n=247, 0.46%) from six sports (Australian Football League, Canadian Football League, football/soccer, ice hockey, National Football League and rugby). Prevalence ranges varied for each condition; smoking (0.9%-16%), depression (3%-49%), anxiety (4.3%-42%), cannabis use (5%-15.7%), adverse alcohol use (6.4%-68.8%), opioid use (7%-23.6%), stress (8.7%-26.9%), illicit drug use (10%-63.2%), anxiety/depression (10.2%-39%) and adverse nutritional behaviour (23.8%-64.5%). Of the studies including M and SD of validated scales, scores for depression, anxiety and sleep disturbance were equivalent to population norms, whereas mild or higher scores were reported for stress and adverse alcohol use. Concussion, pain, injury, neurological factors and declined physical function were shown to have a negative influence on mental health. Both negative and positive influences were observed for: athletic identity, psychosocial support, retirement autonomy, life events, osteoarthritis, retirement and cognitive function. 48% of studies had good methodological quality; however, most studies were cross-sectional, relied on self-report measures and lacked follow-up data and female athletes. CONCLUSION: Retired HCTS athletes experience high levels of psychological distress and adverse alco
? While this systematic review examines mental health outcomes in retired contact sport athletes—a population increasingly self-treating with cannabis for post-traumatic stress, chronic pain, and sleep disruption—the study itself does not address cannabis use or its therapeutic potential in this cohort. This represents an important gap, as retired athletes often experience compounded neurological and psychological sequelae from cumulative head injuries and career-ending trauma, yet cannabis medicine’s role in their recovery remains largely unexplored in the literature. Clinicians should recognize that self-medication patterns in this population may be particularly prevalent given limited access to trauma-informed and pain management interventions; understanding the underlying mental health prevalence data from reviews like this one can inform more nuanced conversations about cannabis use, its risks and potential benefits, and integration with conventional mental health care. The complexity of post-concussion syndrome, depression, and anxiety in this population warrants multimodal approaches, and cannabis should be considered neither as a first-line solution nor categorically dismissed, but rather integrated into a
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