Mortality Doubled After Stressful Football Match

Abstract

Structured AbstractBackgroundStrong emotional stress can lead to death. Even less serious events such as watching stressful football matches are proposed as triggers for mortality. The results are inconclusive, though, probably due to a focus on national teams. Instead, this study analyzes daily mortality after a stressful match of a club team. It also accounts for the role of temperature, a major confounder for daily mortality.MethodsDaily deaths from 01 January 1999 until 10 July 2020 were used to predict mortality separately for women and men on the day of the match (11 July) and the subsequent days. The time series regression model assumed a negative binomial distribution for the death counts, accounted for potential autocorrelation and included temperature as a regressor. 95% prediction intervals were estimated via bootstrapping.ResultsTwo days after the match, mortality was twice as high as expected for men. In contrast to the analysis for women, temperature can be ruled out as a contributing factor.ConclusionWatching stressful football matches can be a matter of life and death for susceptible persons. Making people aware of it could be a cost-efficient way to lower the burden of dying from circulatory diseases.