Repeated Heading Of Soccer Ball Linked To Brain Injury

Most soccer players will tell you that heading the ball is just part of the game, but now researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City suspect that it could be the most dangerous part of the game. The Los Angeles Times reports that scientists at the research hospital interviewed 37 adult league soccer players from New York City and took high-tech scans of their brains. They also asked the players how often they played soccer and approximately how often they headed the ball, and they gave the players a battery of neurocognitive tests. When the players were divided into three group– low heading, medium heading and high heading – the researchers found that players who headed the ball the most had the lowest scores on memory tests, on average. They also had the worst health of the brain’s white matter. The good news? It takes a lot of heading to do the damage: the researchers discovered that players could safely head the ball 885 to 1,550 times a year without white matter problems, and the threshold was almost 1,800 headers for memory-related difficulty. Read more in the Los Angeles Times.