A new study released Tuesday found that people who played football before age 12 were more likely to to have impaired mood and behavior than people who began playing at an older age.
The study, which was conducted by researchers from Boston University's Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) Center and appears in Nature's Translational Psychiatry, looked at 214 former football players, and found that playing football before age 12 doubled the risk to have "problems with behavioral regulation, apathy and executive functioning," and tripled the risk of "clinically elevated depression scores."
Of the 214 former players, 43 played through high school, 103 played through college and the other 68 played in the NFL.