They filled out questionnaires about their playing style and how frequently they headed the ball on the field and in training drills. Lipton and his colleagues examined 37 amateur players, all adults, who had played soccer for an average of 22 years each and had played regularly over the previous year. "It is widely played by millions of people of all ages, including children, and there is concern that heading the ball, an essential part of the game, might cause damage to the brain." "We chose to study soccer because it is the world's most popular sport," says the report's lead author Michael Lipton, associate director of the Gruss Magnetic Resonance Research Center at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. The cumulative effect of many "sub-concussive" blows to the brain has been unknown and unstudied until now. Although the thump of a soccer ball on a forehead seems fairly innocuous, compared with a crashing tackle on the three-yard line, a soccer player may "head" the ball hundreds or even thousands of times during the course of the season. Soccer players who frequently head-butt the ball-a commonly used tactic for passing or scoring in a game-may be risking brain injury, memory loss, and impaired cognitive ability, according to a study published in the journal Radiology.īrain injury and the lasting effects of concussion in sport have become a major health issue in recent years, especially in such hard-hitting sports as American football.
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