With New Evidence That Football Harms Your Brain, Researchers Are Now Concerned About Football
Earlier this week, researchers at Boston University studying the brains of deceased soccer players released new findings on the potential link between athletes and chronic neurological disease, with dire results.
Namely, of the 111 NFL players included in the study, only one was not diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). According to the Brain Injury Research Institute , CTE, the most common boxing-related illness, is a progressive degenerative disease that affects those who are hit by repeated blows to the head.
The most recent headlines about soccer are sports, but those in the BU study are concerned about another group of athletes with concussion: soccer players. While it may be seen as less of a contact sport than football, in football, players tend to headbutt, and BA researcher Ann McKee told Wired that it’s not how the punch is struck, but the repetition of it that matters.
Teams and governing bodies are paying some attention to this, mainly due to early retirement players and lawsuits. In 2015, the U.S. Football Federation established new rules and regulations for young players in a proposed class action lawsuit against American football. A policy has been included in these settings to prohibit ball possession for children ages 10 and younger and reduce headlines for children ages 11 to 13.
Doing research across all sports is difficult because medical researchers say CTE can only be determined through postmortem examination of the brain. The BU study was the largest CTE case series ever published, but its authors are pushing for an even larger longitudinal study in addition to looking for potential CTE biomarkers.
The biomarker indicator can help a player make early retirement decisions, as has the work of other researchers such as Michael Lipton, a neurologist at Albert Einstein School of Medicine in New York. His Einstein Soccer Study hopes to understand how injuries can affect and reshape the brains of current amateur players through blood tests, MRI scans and brain games.