Fighting and Penalty Minutes Associated With Long-term Mortality Among National Hockey League Players, 1967 to 2022

National Hockey League (NHL) players are exposed to frequent head trauma. The long-term consequences of repetitive brain injury, especially for players who frequently engage in fighting, remains unknown.

To investigate the mortality rates and causes of death among NHL enforcers with more career fights and penalty minutes as compared with matched controls.

This matched cohort study examined 6039 NHL players who participated in at least 1 game in the seasons between October 11, 1967, and April 29, 2022, using official NHL data. Cohorts designated as enforcer-fighter (E-F) and enforcer-penalties (E-P) were selected. The E-F cohort consisted of players who participated in 50 or more career fights (n = 331). The E-P cohort included players with 3 or more penalty minutes per game (n = 183). Control-matched NHL players were identified for each E-F player (control-fighter [C-F]) (n = 331) and each E-P player (control-penalties [C-P]) (n = 183).

Fighting and penalty minutes were both used as proxies for head trauma exposure. Players with significantly increased exposure to fighting and penalties (E-F and E-P cohorts) were compared with NHL players with less frequent exposure to head trauma (C-F and C-P cohorts).

Mortality rates and age at death of the enforcer and control cohorts, and their causes of death using data obtained from publicly available sources such as online and national news sources, including NHL.com.

Among the 6039 NHL players identified (mean [SD] age, 47.1 [15.2] years), the mean (SD) number of fights was 9.7 (24.5). The mortality rates of E-F and C-F players (13 [3.9%] vs 14 [4.2%], respectively; P = .84) or E-P and C-P players (13 [7.1.%] vs 10 [5.5%]; P = .34) were not significantly different. The mean (SD) age at death was 10 years younger for E-F players (47.5 [13.8] years) and E-P players (45.2 [10.5] years) compared with C-F players (57.5 [7.1] years) and C-P players (55.2 [8.4] years). There was a difference in causes of death between the control and enforcer players (2 neurodegenerative disorders, 2 drug overdoses, 3 suicides, and 4 vehicular crashes among enforcers vs 1 motor vehicle crash among controls; P = .03), with enforcers dying at higher rates of overdose (2 of 21 [9.5%] vs 0 of 24) and suicide (3 of 21 [14.3%] vs 0 of 24) (P = .02).

The findings of this matched cohort study indicate that there is no difference in overall mortality rates between NHL enforcers and controls. However, being an enforcer was associated with dying approximately 10 years earlier and more frequently of suicide and drug overdose.