The heading of a soccer ball—an intrinsic and routine feature of play in the world’s most popular field sport—causes long-term damage to areas of the brain associated with learning, according to a new study being presented next week at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America.
“We show that adverse effects of heading are present at a location that corresponds to the location of pathology in CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy),” said Dr. Michael L. Lipton, the study’s senior author and a professor of radiology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York.
“We show evidence that the brain changes seen with MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) are in fact a causal link between heading and worse brain function,” Lipton told Newsweek.
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Full Article link: https://www.newsweek.com/heading-soccer-ball-can-damage-brain-research-1993429
