Scientists at Purdue University found that when teenage girls head a football regularly there is a risk of low-level brain injuries which – in some cases – lasts for four or five months
It has become a depressingly familiar pattern. Dead sportsmen’s brains are sliced up, skewered under a microscope and the evidence of how their professions have wrecked their minds becomes horribly clear. Where American football leads, association football has followed. Last week research from Swansea University and University College London linked chronic, repetitive head impacts with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and dementia in deceased players. Yet the broad direction of travel has long been established even before Jeff Astle’s early death in 2002 was ascribed by a coroner to “industrial disease” from heading heavy footballs.
No one disputes that this research is necessary and overdue. But the danger of always gazing backwards is that we miss what is in front of us. Fresh research suggests the dangers of heading didn’t disappear with the arrival of lighter and water-resistant balls, and the risks, particularly to children and teenage girls, may be under-appreciated.
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