A first-of-its-kind study suggests increasing the percentage of youth in the United States who participate in sports to meet a Healthy People 2030 goal could save the nation $80 billion in direct medical costs and productivity losses and deliver more than 1.8 million more quality years of life to Americans.
Every decade since 1980, Healthy People has provided science-based, 10-year national objectives and targets aimed at improving the health and well-being of the nation. The findings from the study are based on results from a computer simulation model of all youth, ages 6-17 years old, in the U.S. developed by the Public Health Informatics, Computational and Operations Research, or PHICOR, team, at the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy. The model shows what could happen if our nation’s youth sports participation went from the current level of 50.7% to the Healthy People 2030 goal of 63.3%.
Karin Pfeiffer, professor and director of the Institute for the Study of Youth Sports at Michigan State University’s College of Education, was part of the team that conducted the study. The team developed a computational model to represent U.S. youth participation in sports and tracked their weight changes and mental health outcomes up until they turned 18 years old. The model also simulated and tracked the associated weight-related health outcomes.
“This is the first time that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS, has included a youth sport-specific goal in the Healthy People 2030,” Pfeiffer said. “If we were to attain that goal, our study shows significant health and economic benefits that would help prevent diseases and save billions of dollars.”
Additionally, the results showed that achieving the youth sport participation goal could decrease overweight and obesity prevalence by slightly more than 3%, resulting in 1.71 million fewer cases among the youth cohort. And, results showed that reaching the goal could gain over 1.8 million quality years of life.
“Sport holds a prominent place in society, and people tend to think there are several benefits to playing sports,” Pfeiffer said. “One of those benefits that has recently been at the forefront of people’s minds is mental health, and our study shows that if we met the Healthy People objective, we would decrease depression and anxiety symptoms and reduce direct medical costs. The mental health benefits are in addition to the physical health benefits that people can confer, such as reduction in coronary heart disease and cancer cases.”
The research team found that a major contributor to the billions of dollars in cost savings was the extent to which increasing physical activity through sports participation helped prevent weight-related health outcomes. The resulting physical health improvements from increasing youth sports participation could avert 352,000 cases of weight-related diseases such as type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, stroke and cancers across a 6- to 17-year-old cohort’s lifetime. This saves over $22 billion in direct medical costs and over $25 billion in productivity losses (such as lost productivity due to individuals being absent or not functioning at full capacity because of a health condition) as a result of improvements in physical health.
The associated cost savings of increased physical activity were not just due to physical health but mental health benefits. Previous studies have shown that playing sports can reduce anxiety and depression symptoms, particularly among adolescents. The findings from the current study showed that the overall reduction in depression and anxiety symptoms from achieving the sports participation goal would save $3.61 billion in direct medical costs and $28.38 billion in productivity losses across the youth cohort.
The study also found that the cost savings far exceed current investment into increasing youth sports participation. For context, before the COVID-19 pandemic, the Aspen Institute estimated that $30 billion to $40 billion was spent by families on youth sports based on surveys and national sport participation data. Further, the overall findings may be on the conservative side as the model did not account for chronic health conditions outside of weight-related ones like osteoporosis; the potential indirect effects of sports participation such as improved nutrition; decreased substance use; or the impact of sports participation on academic performance, social skills, emotional regulation or mood.
“What is unique about this study is how it shows direct benefits in several health-related areas but simultaneously calculates economic impact,” Pfeiffer said. “And there are benefits to increasing sport participation at lower levels than reaching the Healthy People goal as well. This means raising levels of sport participation even a small amount is important and provides concrete evidence to policymakers that expanding availability and accessibility of youth sport programming is vital.”
Other members of the research team included Aspen Institute’s Project Play initiative, collaborators from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Adelphi University, Stellenbosch University, University of Texas at Austin, Utah State University and Michigan State University.
The study was published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.