RESEARCH FINDING: Heading the Ball is Dangerous....

[Enugu II]

Heading footballs causes same brain damage as boxing - major new study
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2017 ... ign=buffer
Henry Bodkin
15 FEBRUARY 2017 • 12:01AM


Professional football is as risky as boxing in causing brain damage that can lead to dementia and early death, a major new investigation warns.

Scientists at University College London say years of heading the ball can cause the same type of progressive damage as suffered by heavyweight prizefighters.

They have called for “urgent” widescale research to establish whether repeated sub-concussive head impacts caused by heading may also be prompting dementia in the amateur game.

Meanwhile, the daughter of the former England striker Jeff Astle, who died of a degenerative brain disease aged 59, criticised the football authorities’ “indefensible and disgraceful” response to the issue.

Researchers conducted post-mortem examinations of the brains of five professional players, and one “committed” amateur, who had played for an average of 26 years and who had all suffered from dementia.

They found evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), which can be caused by repeated blows to the head and is a condition known to lead to dementia.

The rate of CTE in the footballers’ brains was greater than the 12 per cent average found in the general population.

The players had also developed dementia around their mid-sixties, an average of ten years earlier than most people afflicted with the incurable disease.

Dr Helen Ling, the UCL scientist who led the research, said this was the first time CTE had been confirmed in a group of retired footballers.

“These players had the same pathology as boxers,” she said.

“The most pressing question now is to ask how common dementia is among retired footballers.

“If we can demonstrate that the risk is higher than the normal population then we would need to look at putting preventative strategies in place.”

Today’s research will be a spur to the growing campaign to force the Football Association to focus more on the dangers of heading.

Critics say the sport’s governing body has been slow to recognise the issue, despite the long list of famous players who have suffered from dementia.

These include the former Tottenham captain Danny Blanchflower, Bob Paisley, who played made 253 appearances for Liverpool, and Jeff Astle.

Astle’s daughter Dawn, who lost her father in 2002, welcomed the new UCL study, but said she was not surprised by its conclusions.

“I think that’s what is so very frustrating, the fact that it’s nearly 15 years since my dad died and the fact that nothing from any footballing authorities has been done.

“It is really indefensible and disgraceful."

Professor Huw Morris, a consultant neurologist at the Royal Free Hospital, said footballers may not only be damaging their brains from heading, but also from rapid decelerations while playing and impacts with other bodies.

He cautioned, however, against extrapolating the new findings to the wider football playing public, and emphasised that retired footballers have a lower mortality rate than the general population because of the general fitness benefit.

“At the moment we don’t know the extent of the problem,” he said.

“Clearly more research needs to be done.”

Last December the Professional Footballers’ Association called on the game’s authorities to consider banning children under the age of 10 from heading the ball, following research by the University of Stirling which found players suffered memory impairment after heading.

The FA’s head of medicine, Dr Charlotte Cowie, welcomed the new study, which is published in the journal Acta Neuropathalogica.

She said a 2015 panel had decided research was needed into whether degenerative brain disease is more common among former footballers.

“The FA is determined to support this research and is also committed to ensuring that any research process is independent robust and thorough, so that when the results emerge, everyone in the game can be confident in its findings,” she said.

[wiseone]

Very troubling research. I heard that in the USA, they have banned heading the ball for kids football (under 12s I believe). In a weird way, this will actually improve the technical development of young American players. No balls in the air = kids having to learn to pass and control the ball on the floor = improved technique.

[peron33uk]

Well i think so, i remember the American football research by Dr Bennet Omalu, the fire the guy received for this claim which proved to be correct.

Anyway Will Smith captured it in the movie "Concussion".

[mcal]

...old school americans don corrupt these british scholars.
What hurts is ball to head not head to ball.
Example, when a close range free kick hits the head it hurts bad, but this does not happen often. Conversely, when the player anticipated and head an incoming ball it does not hurt because he absorbs the impact by judging the speed.

[TonyTheTigerKiller]

Seriously? They had to do research to know that?? All they had to do was ask me. Yes, ball heading is dangerous and wet ball heading can be permanently devastating


Cheers.

[Kabalega]

First of all, their work does not show much.

That is why

"they have called for "urgent" widescale research to establish whether repeated sub-concussive head impacts caused by heading may also be prompting dementia in the amateur game."

[ohsee]

Seriously? They had to do research to know that?? All they had to do was ask me. Yes, ball heading is dangerous and wet ball heading can be permanently devastating


Cheers.

No wonder.

[The YeyeMan]

Seriously? They had to do research to know that?? All they had to do was ask me. Yes, ball heading is dangerous and wet ball heading can be permanently devastating


Cheers.

No wonder.

You didn't know? He used to be called BarryTheBallHeaderer. Too much of that and he became TonyTheP***yLicker. Now he kills tigers, apparently.

[Coach]

Nonsense. Big Andy Carroll, 23 headed goals, currently in the form of his life. CTE? Hogwash, fizz it in to the farpost, big AC steaming in from the edge of the box. Bosh!

[Man Ataye]

Seriously? They had to do research to know that?? All they had to do was ask me. Yes, ball heading is dangerous and wet ball heading can be permanently devastating


Cheers.

No wonder.

You didn't know? He used to be called BarryTheBallHeaderer. Too much of that and he became TonyTheP***yLicker. Now he kills tigers, apparently.

U guys r wicked.

[Man Ataye]

I am going with Mcal's conclusion.

[ohenhen1]

Confirmation of what we already know.

[Enugu II]

Confirmation of what we already know.

I am not sure that this confirms what we already know. I knew that heading the ball may cause injury to the brain but I had no idea that the injuries are related to CTE or dementia. Those of you who knew must be clairvoyant as I am not sure the scientific community had data to show such connections.

Research is a painstaking process involving numerous tests to confirm and disconfirm specific situations. You cannot just use one study to reach conclusions. For instance, this connection to dementia and CTE are new (for me) and there may be other types of brain injuries for which there are no data yet to show connections. On CTE, for instance, most of current tests are based on the dead and mostly male. A new study on women could provide slightly different results.

Meanwhile, if these findings are showing dire consequences from heading the ball it might be best for FIFA to act proactively or face legal consequences that would be extremely costly. It cannot be business as usual if in fact these connections are backed by strong science.

[mcal]

...heading ball (intentionally) does not cause injury.
Ball striking head (unintentionally) may cause injury.

[ohenhen1]

...heading ball (intentionally) does not cause injury.
Ball striking head (unintentionally) may cause injury.

They both cause some sort of damage. If you use the right technique it may reduce the impact on the head. But several small impacts may also cause damage to the head.

[mcal]

...heading ball (intentionally) does not cause injury.
Ball striking head (unintentionally) may cause injury.

They both cause some sort of damage. If you use the right technique it may reduce the impact on the head. But several small impacts may also cause damage to the head.

...technique is the key, reason why kids as young as 10 or 11 may not be encouraged use their head. Older players understand the approach.
The only time I remember heading a ball hurt me was when we use to play with those heavy UNICEF ball for primary school.

[TonyTheTigerKiller]

Seriously? They had to do research to know that?? All they had to do was ask me. Yes, ball heading is dangerous and wet ball heading can be permanently devastating


Cheers.

No wonder.

A senile old fool can rack up 25000+ posts by posting demented one liners and he's never even kicked a ball in his entire life. What's your excuse? You do have my utmost sympathy


Cheers.

[Enugu II]

Does Heading a Soccer Ball Cause Brain Damage?
Soccer heading poses greater risk to youth players
By Annie Sneed on June 26, 2014 17Véalo en español
https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... in-damage/


It has become clear that impact sports like football and boxing can cause long-term brain damage. Now soccer is coming under scrutiny. As evidence mounts that excessively heading a soccer ball can injure a player’s brain, professional players such as Brandi Chastain, a star of the 1999 FIFA Women’s World Cup, are using this year’s tournament to call attention to the health risks facing young players. To learn about the latest science on soccer heading and brain injuries, Scientific American spoke to Robert Cantu, professor of neurosurgery at the Boston University School of Medicine and co-founder of the Sports Legacy Institute.

[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]

What’s the scientific evidence for whether heading a soccer ball can cause brain damage?
Our findings and the findings of other researchers show that heading a soccer ball can contribute to neurodegenerative problems, such as chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Researchers who’ve followed soccer players have seen a close relationship between the amount of heading that a player does and brain abnormalities. There’ve also been studies where researchers compared soccer players to swimmers, and swimmers’ brains look perfectly normal while the soccer players’ brains had abnormalities in their white matter fiber tracts. Nerve cells transmit their messages to other nerve cells by way of their fiber tracts, or axons, and if the brain is violently shaken enough, a person can have disruption of their fiber tracts.

What are the effects of these brain abnormalities?
Excessive shaking of the brain—excessive subconcussive and concussive trauma—can lead to cognitive symptoms, including memory problems as well as behavior and mood problems such as anxiety and depression. Other symptoms include trouble with sleep, light-headedness and headaches.

Do researchers see this brain damage later in life, once someone has stopped playing soccer?
We haven’t yet followed these abnormalities over years. Those studies are ongoing. Do those abnormalities clear up over time or do they not? We don’t know the answer yet. It’s probably some of both.

Is there a threshold of force below which a person can safely head a ball?
The science isn’t there yet. We don’t even have a threshold that predicts the linear and rotational accelerations needed to cause a concussion. The linear forces are measured in gravity, and we’ve measured hits in various sports as high as 150 g’s where people haven’t had concussions and we’ve had other individuals with hits as low as 50 to 60 g’s who’ve had concussions. The other kind of forces—the rotational or twisting forces—which are measured in radians per seconds squared, we also don’t know those forces needed to produce concussions.

We also don’t have a good handle on the threshold needed to produce subconcussive trauma, which are blows to the head that don’t produce symptoms but do produce structural changes observable in neuroimaging.

Why is it taking so long for researchers to understand the effects of concussive and subconcussive impacts on the brain?
It’s a very complex issue. You have biomechanical forces that can be measured, like the linear and rotational acceleration. But we’re dealing with a human, not an inert object in a laboratory. There are a lot of biological factors that influence whether that human being has a concussion: How many concussions that person has had before, how severe those concussions were and how close together they occurred. Other factors include: age—it’s easier to be concussed at an earlier age than at an adult age, and the recovery is slower; neck strength—if you see the hit coming and you have a strong neck, you significantly reduce your chance of a concussion; hydration status—if you’re dehydrated, you’re more likely to have a concussion; and sex—women are more easily concussed than men.

What’s your advice for soccer parents? Do you recommend an age cutoff for heading a soccer ball?
We recommend that youngsters under the age of 14 not head the ball in soccer, not play tackle football and not full-body check in ice hockey. Impacts to the head are more damaging under that age, due to a number of structural and metabolic reasons. The brains of youngsters are not as myelinated as adult brains. Myelin is the coating of the neuron fibers—kind of like coating on a telephone wire. It helps transmission of signals and it also gives neurons much greater strength, so young brains are more vulnerable.

Youngsters also have disproportionately big heads. By the age of five, their heads are about 90 percent of their adult circumference, but the neck has not nearly developed to that point. They have big heads on very weak necks and that bobblehead-doll effect means you don’t have to impact the head as hard to cause damage.

Should heading be banned from soccer altogether?
It shouldn’t be banned because we don’t have enough evidence right now to understand exactly what are the risks. The point of this research isn’t to reduce participation in soccer. The point is to have more people play soccer, but have them play it in a safer manner at the youth level. This doesn’t mean that youngsters can’t be taught these skills. Instead of heading a soccer ball, they should practice heading with a beach ball

[Enugu II]

Heading footballs can injure adolescents' brains as well
Sean Ingle
https://www.theguardian.com/football/bl ... s-research
Contact author
@seaningle
Sunday 19 February 2017 15.19 EST Last modified on Monday 20 February 2017 05.58 EST

It has become a depressingly familiar pattern. Dead sportsmen’s brains are sliced up, skewered under a microscope and the evidence of how their professions have wrecked their minds becomes horribly clear. Where American football leads, association football has followed. Last week research from Swansea University and University College London linked chronic, repetitive head impacts with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and dementia in deceased players. Yet the broad direction of travel has long been established even before Jeff Astle’s early death in 2002 was ascribed by a coroner to “industrial disease” from heading heavy footballs.

No one disputes that this research is necessary and overdue. But the danger of always gazing backwards is that we miss what is in front of us. Fresh research suggests the dangers of heading didn’t disappear with the arrival of lighter and water-resistant balls, and the risks, particularly to children and teenage girls, may be under-appreciated.

In 2015 I wrote about ground-breaking research from scientists at Purdue University in Indiana which showed that even with modern footballs the forces involved in heading back goal-kicks and long punts were far higher than expected. Some registered at between 50Gs and 100Gs – similar to American football players smashing into each other or punches thrown by boxers.

The team at Purdue have now discovered another potentially worrying issue: that when teenage girls head a football regularly there is a risk of low‑level brain injuries, which in some cases lasts for four or five months before the brain looks normal on MRI scans. Think about that and ask yourself why, with all the money sloshing around football and flowing into agents’ pockets, aren’t more studies conducted?

The Purdue blueprint would be a good place to start. Their scientists recruited 26 female high school athletes – 14 of whom played soccer and 12 who did other non-collision sports such as track and field, swimming and basketball – and gave them several MRI scans over the course of a year. The soccer players were scanned before the season started, twice during the season and then two or three times after the season had ended. Each training session and match was also filmed, with players wearing an xPatch sensor behind their right ears, allowing the academics to record the impact of every header and collision greater than 20Gs of force .

The results were startling. While the soccer players didn’t suffer concussions, some of them developed what researchers called “marked cerebrovascular reactivity changes in the frontotemporal aspects of the brain”, which persisted for several months. “It is a big deal,” Eric Nauman, the director of the human injury research and regenerative technologies laboratory at Purdue, told me. “Some players saw pretty dramatic changes in their cerebral blood flow because of accumulating head impacts. Those levels changed significantly and stayed elevated. That was kind of a shock to us. We knew we would see those changes when we studied American football players but we didn’t in soccer.”

Nauman’s colleague Tom Talavage says they have as-yet unpublished data that strongly suggest a long-term physiological response to asymptomatic injury taking place – a form of inflammation coupled with elevated blood flow levels – which can be associated with tiredness, lower concentration levels and impaired cognitive function. “This response is arguably a ‘healing’ process but one has to consider the idea that if an adolescent’s brain is expending energy repairing itself, it is unlikely that its development is progressing optimally,” he adds.

In women’s sports it has long been known soccer has the largest number of traumatic brain injuries annually and has among the highest concussion rates, with rates slightly exceeding men’s football at the collegiate level. But this research shows sub-concussive injuries, from heading footballs, are also a potential issue.

What exacerbates the problem is that players usually don’t realise their brains have minor damage and so keep on playing, increasing the likelihood of more serious problems. “You can bruise any other part of your body and it feels sore so you lay off that spot,” says Nauman. “But your brain doesn’t have that kind of response.”

So what should be done? On Friday Uefa promised to undertake a research project which would count the number of times children aged eight to 12, and 14 to 16, head the ball in games and training sessions. But the Purdue scientists consider that insufficient. As they point out, every time kids dive or collide with each other there is a risk of whiplash or other rapid head movement that may well contribute to low-level damage that leads to injury.

Instead they suggest a number of measures: banning players under 12 from heading the ball – something that already happens in the US – and reducing the severity of such impacts among teenagers by making sure they are not playing and practising headers every day. “People argue that if youngsters can’t head the ball then they don’t learn proper technique but the big point is when you are 12 and under, your neck and shoulders and back aren’t strong enough for you to have proper technique,” says Nauman. But he wants to preserve the game not radically alter it. “It isn’t hard to reduce the head impacts in practice and save them for games. Really it is about giving the brain a chance to rest and recover.”

[Molue Conductor]

How is Mutiu Adepoju doing these days?

[jb]

Nonsense. Big Andy Carroll, 23 headed goals, currently in the form of his life. CTE? Hogwash, fizz it in to the farpost, big AC steaming in from the edge of the box. Bosh!

Coach, it is not nonsense. You won't know until you cut the brain on the autopsy table.

[Spicyee]

...the same researchers who celebrate the raw brutality that is NFL, Rugby and UFC...

[Coach]

@Jb, have a butchers at Admiral Andrew Reginald Carroll the season leading up to his transfer to Liverpool and ask yourself, minus the headers, does he get the move? 2 minutes left on the clock, in-swinging corner, Champions League at stake, who do you want on the end of it Field Marshall Sergio Ramos or Boy George? Away at the Etihad, ball whipped in at pace, do you want Radamel throwing his head at it or Charlie Boy blowing it kisses?

If the ball's met full on, flush, headed back the way it came, chances are, it's in, you're 1-nil up...you dont faff around with your ABCs, CTEs like a bungling extra on Sesame Street, you brush yourself down, get your lads behind the ball, two banks of four and dig in deep till the whistle's done.