Women come off second best at heading a football

FOOTBALL could be more dangerous for women than men because their brains are more susceptible to damage from heading the ball, research has suggested.

In a study of nearly 100 amateur players, women showed five times the amount of brain tissue damage than men on scans.

Women’s football is the UK’S largest female team sport, with nearly three million players taking part each year.

Researchers from Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, warned that heading a ball can cause similar damage to the brain’s white matter as suffering a traumatic brain injury.

Specialists fear that repeated heading can lead to cognitive decline and behaviour changes.

“In general, men do a lot more heading than women, but we wanted to specifically examine if men and women fare similarly or differently with a similar amount of exposure to repeated impacts to the head,” said Prof Michael Lipton, the study’s lead author.

“In both groups, this effect we see in the brain’s white matter increased with greater amounts of heading. But women exhibit about five times as much microstructural abnormality as men when they have similar amounts of heading exposure.”

Prof Lipton and his team used an advanced brain imaging technique to assess microscopic changes in the white matter in 49 men and 49 women.

The scans detect subtle brain damage by measuring the diffusion of water in white matter, known as fractional anisotropy (FA). Finding an area with low FA, indicates structural damage to the brain. The scans showed that while both men and women experienced lower FA values related to more repetitive heading, women had lower FA levels across a larger volume of the brain.

Researchers speculated that may be caused by differences in neck strength, sex hormones or genetics.

The research was published in the journal Radiology.