Evidence continues to mount that footballers are putting their brain health at risk by doing frequent headers. -- dpa
Evidence is mounting that heading a football is linked to brain injury and cognitive decline.
Health researchers in the United States are issuing renewed warnings after scans identified the area just behind the forehead as the region where most damage occurs.
In papers released by the journal Neurology and by Jama Network Open, a Columbia University team reported that a section of the brain "between white and grey matter" sustains "the most damage from heading".
This most vulnerable part of the brain sits "in the outermost brain layer just behind the forehead", the researchers said, warning that the damage sustained "leads to cognitive deficits".
At the same time, they said that there is no proof heading a ball causes injury, only that their study "shows an association".
"The most fervent headers of the ball - reporting more than 1,000 headers each year - had significantly greater microstructural damage in white matter near the brain's cerebral sulci in the orbitofrontal cortex, just behind the forehead," the researchers reported.
Researchers have been looking at the risks of headers for years, but Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons professor of radiology and biomedical engineering Dr Michael Lipton said that this study showed "for the first time, that exposure to repeated head impacts causes specific changes in the brain that, in turn, impair cognitive function".
He said that there isn't enough research yet to make general recommendations on a limit, but said that in their study, people who only headed a football twice a week had similar brain scans to healthy non-contact athletes.
Since the death of former England professional footballer Jeff Astle, who died in 2002 at the age of 59 after a dementia diagnosis, warnings about the possible danger of years of heading a football have proliferated.
When Jack Charlton, another English footballer and a World Cup winner in 1966, died in 2020 at the age of 85, his family said the dementia that preceded his death was likely caused by a long career spent heading the less water-resistant leather footballs of the era, which got heavier as they soaked up rain. - dpa