BREAKING: Largest study ever on pro soccer players (>7,000 in Scotland) led by @WillStewNeuro finds players were: 3.5x more likely to die of any neurodegenerative disease5x more likely to die of Alzheimer's4x more likely to die of ALS/MNDThis is bighttps://t.co/bc6g9D5nCY— Chris Nowinski, Ph.D. (@ChrisNowinski1) October 21, 2019 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1908483?query=featured_home Doesn't look good, coaches.
Worse than you think. It is going to be a function of cumulative impacts. Whether the players is professional or amateur is going to make a difference. Just how many impacts.
Just get rid of headers. The cumulative effect of those is big. The brain was not meant as a striking instrument. It would change the game a lot but it would still be 95% there with no headers. Use shoulder instead.
Your comment struck (no pun originally intended) me. Animals that are meant to strike with the head have evolved: The brains of most animals that are prone to head banging — these include deer and other antlered mammals, as well as various birds — are relatively small and (unlike a human’s) smooth-surfaced; and they’re bathed in only small amounts of cerebrospinal fluid, leaving little room for the brain to move and be shocked by the sudden decelerations and accelerations of their weaponized heads. Moreover, both rams and woodpeckers are scrupulous in the precise, single-direction fashion in which they smash their heads into things, whether trees or one another: The aim is such that there’s very little side-to-side torsion exerted on the brain, none of the movement that induces whiplash injury and other kinds of damage. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/02/science/skulls-engineered-to-take-hard-knocks.html
Yeah, I pulled up hibs vs kilmarnock 2013, 9 headers in the first minute, 2 from driven balls. I'd be interested to see the comparative study of spanish players born after say, 1990?
I agree. We're probably past the main danger period. Maybe. But it's good to be aware—there's some coach out there drilling his high school kids with a hundred clearance headers per week. Also, balls fly faster now. We don't know if it's number of impacts vs. intensity of impacts that causes the damage. Something causes damage, lets be aware for the sake of the long-term health of players. Too late to save me.