Brain damage can occur when a soccer player “heads” the ball too frequently, according to a recent study.
While the problem is highly likely with too many headers — about 1,300 per year — the problem does not appear to be there in smaller numbers.
“Practice turns out to be a much bigger source of exposure [to heading] than actual games,” Dr. Michael Lipton, Director of Radiology Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and lead author of the study, told CNN. “Some people were reporting heading 5,000 times a year.”
Lipton and his colleagues interviewed 39 soccer players from amateur leagues. The players consisted of men in their late twenties and early thirties who play regularly but not professionally. Many of the participants have been playing for most of their lives.
The players filled out a questionnaire meant to help them estimate the number of headers they make each year. When Lipton and his team compared the brain scans of players reporting lower numbers of headers to those reporting higher numbers, there were distinct differences between the two group’s brains.
The scans revealed that the regions of the brain responsible for functions such as attention, memory, planning, and visual and spatial reasoning all showed signs of damage due to heading.
