Former NFL players die at a faster rate than other professional athletes, study finds

A new study of more than 6,000 former professional athletes found that National Football League players died at a rate that was almost 1.3 times higher than Major League Baseball players. It’s the first to compare mortality rates between two groups of professional athletes; previous studies that compared professional athletes to the general population showed a lower risk of death for football players.

The findings, published Friday in , come amid growing concern about head trauma among current and former NFL players and their risk of developing the neurodegenerative disease , or chronic traumatic encephalopathy. The NFL players died of neurodegenerative diseases at a higher rate than MLB players,