South Carolina Personal Injury Attorneys

New research, presented Tuesday at the Radiological Society of North American annual meeting, indicated that frequent “head balls” can cause the brain to suffer traumatic brain damage, especially if over 1,300 headers occur in a given year.

For players who regularly practice their soccer skills, reaching this number is not unrealistic.

Dr. Michael Lipton, the lead study author and Director of Radiology Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, claims that head balls actually occur more frequently during practice than actual games. Some players were reported to have headed a soccer ball almost 5,000 times a year.

Thirty-nine amateur soccer players – men in their late twenties and early thirties who play regularly but not professionally – were recruited for Lipton’s research.

The participants filled out a questionnaire to help estimate the number of headers that occur individually each year. Distinct differences were found in brain scans between players who reported low numbers compared to those reporting a higher number.

“Excessive heading definitely seems to be associated with impairment of memory and processing speed,” says Lipton. “Soccer may not be as benign as people thought it was.”

Lipton’s study uses diffusion tensor imaging (DIT) to measure the movement of water molecules in the brain’s white matter. Healthy brains have water molecules that move in a uniform direction through white matter, while the water molecules move at random in an injured brain.

Heading is a dangerous part of soccer, in part because the player’s head makes direct contact with the ball, but also because other players often run into each other. This can cause further head and neck trauma.

However, the study also indicated that an increase in concussions was not as much of an indicator for the altered brain images as was routine heading.

Areas of the brain that are associated with attention, memory, planning, and visual and spatial reasoning all showed signs of damage as a result of heading.

Click here to read more about brain injuries.

Source: CNN.com

By: South Carolina Personal Injury Attorney Pete Strom