Researchers know the cause of brain damage in football players
Brain scans showed that there is a close link between those who frequently header a ball while playing football and brain damage.
Footballers who often header a ball are at a great risk of damaging their brain.
The brain injuries that result from too many headers can cause problems with memory, sight, problem solving, planning and player’s attention span.
The researchers from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in America studied the brain scans of amateur footballers. Study tells us that the brain injuries were similar to those in patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI).
Football player has a high risk of gradually developing brain injuries if he headers the ball more than 1000 times a year or 20 headers a week.
Dr Michael Lipton, the leader of the research, said:
“Heading a ball is not an impact of a magnitude that will lacerate nerve fibres in the brain, but repetitive heading could set off a cascade of responses that can lead to degeneration of brain cells. In the past, pitchers in Little League Baseball sustained shoulder injuries at a rate that was alarming. But research has helped to make various approaches, including limits on the amount of pitching a child performs which have substantially reduced the incidence of these injuries.”
The scientists used an advanced MRI imaging technique – diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) – to generate scans of the brains of 32 players. Their average age is 30.8 years and they had played the game since their childhood years.
At the end all the players were asked to recount how many times they had headed the ball within the last year, those who headed balls more often were developing the most severe brain damages.
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