First we want our kids to be active and play sports because otherwise they might end up as antisocial and overweight couch potatoes. Then we find out that sports like football can cause concussions and Little League baseball pitching can cause shoulder injuries. Unfortunately, there’s more bad news.
A new study by researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine found that hitting a soccer ball repeatedly increases your risk of brain injury and cognitive impairment. Using advanced magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), researchers scanned the brains of 38 amateur soccer players who had been playing since childhood. The subjects, with an average age of 30, reported how often they headed, or hit soccer balls with their head, in the past year. Researchers found soccer players who headed the ball most often had brain injury symptoms similar to patients with concussion. The threshold for brain injury is head butting the soccer ball more than 1000-1500 times a year. While that sounds like a lot, it could be achieved with just 3-4 head butts a day. This frequent heading resulted in verbal memory deficits and mind-coordination problems when compared to less active soccer players.
A major flaw with this study is that the frequency of heading in the past year may not be reflective of how often the player headed the ball their entire life. Perhaps a player that played a lot more soccer recently has more brain injury than a player who played a lot earlier in life but doesn’t too often now. We don’t know whether childhood soccer heading can lead to permanent brain damage later in adult life even if they stop playing soccer.
Still, this study does raise major concerns for how soccer is played, especially for children with growing brains. 14 million of the 18 million Americans that play soccer are under 18 and we must make guidelines to protect their brain health. Soccer is becoming a more popular sport, but learning disabilities, memory problems and ADHD are also on the rise. Could they be connected? Let’s just ban heading in soccer for children and track if any improvement in brain health occurs. Kids can still get the health benefits of playing soccer without bashing their heads.
*image from shutterstock.com
What are your thoughts?
