Heading Soccer Balls Linked To Memory Problems

First, researchers noticed disturbing damage in the brains of people who played professional football, then similar damage showed up in people who played hockey.  Now, it seems, we can add soccer to the list of sports that puts our brains at risk. Writing in the Well column of the New York Times, Gretchen Reynolds reports on a study conducted at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, for which 34 adult men and women who had played soccer since childhood and competed year-round in adult soccer leagues were asked how many times they had headed a soccer ball in the previous year, and if they had ever had a concussion. The soccer players also took tests measuring their memory and cognitive skills, and had their brains scanned for slight structural changes. Reynolds reports that those who had headed the ball more than about 1,100 times in the previous 12 months showed significant loss of white matter in parts of their brains involved with memory, attention and the processing of visual information, compared with players who had headed the ball fewer times. Wait, it gets worse: the players who had headed the ball about 1,100 times or more in the past year were also substantially worse at recalling lists of words read to them, forgetting or fumbling the words far more often than players who had headed the ball less often. And worse: Reynolds cites a second study by a researcher at Humboldt State University in California, that tracked the heading history and cognitive health of 51 soccer players at the school over the course of a season. Those who headed the ball most often during the season, whether in practices or games, performed significantly worse on tests of visual memory, including the ability to recall shapes and images, than they had at the start of the season. Read more from Gretchen Reynolds.