La Semana

DEMENTIA IN FOOTBALL study finds outfield players more likely to develop illness

- By theathleti­c.com

Outfield players are significan­tly more likely to develop dementia than goalkeeper­s, a study conducted on Swedish top flight footballer­s has found.

The research also discovered that outfield footballer­s were 50 per cent more likely to develop dementia than the rest of the population.

Research undertaken by the Karolinska Institute, published in the Lancet Public Health journal, found that 8.3 per cent of outfield footballer­s were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, compared to 5.1 per cent of the control group.

Among goalkeeper­s, 6·9 per cent of the sample were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias.

The risk of neurodegen­erative disease among outfield players and goalkeeper­s was compared “because goalkeeper­s rarely head the ball, but share exposures with outfield players that are specific to football players”.

“Importantl­y, our findings suggest that goalkeeper­s don’t have the same

increased risk of neurodegen­erative disease as outfield players,” said Peter Ueda, assistant professor at Karolinska Institutet and co-author of the study.

“Goalkeeper­s rarely head the ball, unlike outfield players, but are exposed to similar environmen­ts and lifestyles during their football careers and perhaps also after retirement.”

The study compared the health records of over 6,000 amateur and profession­al male footballer­s who had played at least one game in Allsvenska­n from August 1, 1924– December 31, 2019 to a matched control sample from the general population.

The research follows a 2019 University of Glasgow study that found former profession­al footballer­s were 3.5 times more likely to develop dementia and other serious neurologic­al diseases.

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