Neuroimaging studies: In soccer, over one thousand “headers” per year can lead to brain injury and cognitive impairment

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Study indi­cates there may be a head­ing thresh­old above which the risk for brain dam­age increas­es sig­nif­i­cant­ly: An Inter­view with Michael L. Lip­ton (Dana Foundation):

“Dr. Lip­ton pio­neered the use of MRI tech­nol­o­gy to detect mild trau­mat­ic brain injuries (mTBI) from con­cus­sions. Such injuries, which may bring cog­ni­tive and behav­ioral impair­ment and even neu­rode­gen­er­a­tion lat­er in life in some indi­vid­u­als, is increas­ing­ly seen as a major pub­lic health prob­lem–in par­tic­u­lar for those who play con­tact sports. Accord­ing to the US Cen­ters for Dis­ease Con­trol: “From 2001 to 2009, the num­ber of annu­al TBI-relat­ed [emer­gency room] vis­its increased sig­nif­i­cant­ly, from 153,375 to 248,418, with the high­est rates among males aged 10–19 years.”

With sup­port from the Dana Foun­da­tion and the Nation­al Insti­tutes of Health, Lip­ton has con­duct­ed neu­roimag­ing stud­ies on soc­cer play­ers, who fre­quent­ly jolt their brains by “head­ing” the ball. His goal is to under­stand bet­ter the rela­tion­ship between head impacts and result­ing brain dam­age and cog­ni­tive impairments.

…peo­ple who report­ed few­er than about 1,000 head­ers in the pre­vi­ous year gen­er­al­ly stayed in the nor­mal range on brain imag­ing and func­tion tests. But those who exceed­ed 1,000 head­ers per year had on aver­age a dra­mat­ic reduc­tion in FA (Note: frac­tion­al anisotropy, a mea­sure of neu­ronal health) as well as in cog­ni­tive per­for­mance. So this was at least a pre­lim­i­nary indi­ca­tion that there may be a thresh­old above which the risk for adverse effects on the brain goes up steeply—and that those who can keep below that lev­el of expo­sure may be rel­a­tive­ly safe…

And now we’re see­ing evi­dence that mul­ti­ple events like that, in quick suc­ces­sion, can have espe­cial­ly adverse effects. So the most impor­tant piece of advice for some­one who has just been con­cussed is to avoid hits to the head again until he’s had time for a full recov­ery. But if he doesn’t rec­og­nize the first con­cus­sion, he won’t be care­ful to avoid the sec­ond one—he’ll go right back onto the field and run the risk of being hit again and again.”

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