Footie headers may cause brain injuries

The football season is in full swing and those who play the game are usually healthy, living longer and having much lower risks of heart disease.

Football has never been classified as a contact sport, rugby yes, but not football. Well, it turns out one aspect of soccer does involve damaging contact – heading the ball.

Recent research shows professional football may be linked to the same sort of brain injuries seen in boxing.

And as yesterday’s front page story shows, the effects on families can be devastating.

This isn’t the first time football has been implicated in brain damage, though it was in the rather different sport of American football. In that game, players have developed dementia as the result of repeated mini concussions during charges and tackles.

During tackling the brain is shaken inside the rigid boney skull causing damage due to bruising. This can lead to mini concussion where consciousness isn’t necessarily lost.

The startling findings on our own footballers come from post-mortem studies at the Institute of Neurology in London. The brains of six dead male footballers, all of whom had dementia, were examined. Four showed a characteristic pattern of damage that’s nearly universal in the brains of boxers but uncommon in the general population. It’s called chronic traumatic

Head impacts can eventually cause dementia

encephalopathy (CTE). Even in this small study it appears repeated heading of the ball, together with other head impacts from collisions and falls, can cause damage leading to dementia. The six brains also all showed changes characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease.

“CTE has been found in 100% of the brains of boxers, but only 6% of the general population,” commented Helen Ling, lead author of the study. “In addition, we know of three other case histories of footballers found to show CTE, post-mortem.”

The six footballers whose brains were examined had been part of a group of 14 retired players who’d developed dementia.

The men showed these symptoms from their mid-sixties and died 10 years later on average. Full concussion was rare, so it was thought many minor impacts had caused the damage rather than a few major ones. And that damage wasn’t simply due to leather balls, which used to become much heavier in the wet.

Professor Rob Howard of University College London says: “We’ve known that the concussive impacts of American football players can lead to this pathology, but this paper suggests that aspects of ‘real’ football – perhaps repeatedly heading the ball – might also result in long-term brain damage.”

I now find myself counting all the headers when I watch a match in the Premier League.