Study Says Soccer Players May Injure Brains When ‘Heading’ Ball

Soccer players who repeatedly strike the ball with their heads may be causing measurable damage to their brains, even if they never suffer a concussion, reports a new study that appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association. By examining brain scans of a dozen professional soccer players from Germany, researchers found a pattern of damage that strongly resembled that of patients with mild traumatic brain injury, according to Inga Katharina Koerte, MD, a neuroradiologist at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, who led the study.

Dr. Koerte and her colleagues focused on the athletes’ white matter — the interior portion of the brain that carries signals from nerve cells to the spinal cord. They tracked the movement of individual water molecules within the brain tissue to see whether the atoms moved in a narrow linear pattern or in a random, diffuse pattern. Movement along a narrow track suggested the molecules were being hemmed in by healthy fibers. Diffusion, however, suggested that brain tissue had suffered some form of damage and could no longer restrict the movement of water molecules. For more information, click here to read the full release.