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Research: heading a football causes impairment of brain function


dub

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Sound obvious but I guess no one's done research into it before?

Any impairment clears up by 24 hours, but if research does find that it causes long term issues that could be a pretty depressing find. 

https://theconversation.com/how-we-discovered-that-heading-a-football-causes-impairment-of-brain-function-67468

Quote

Now our new research, published in EBioMedicine, suggests that just a single session of heading practice results in temporary impairment in memory and a disruption of the normal balance of chemicals in the brain. We must now investigate whether these effects remain temporary after repeated football heading exposure and what the long-term consequences on brain health are.

....

We asked a group of football players to head a ball 20 times, fired from a ball machine to simulate the pace and power of a corner kick. Before and after the heading sessions, we tested players’ brain inhibition measured using transcranial magnetic stimulation, and players’ cognitive function such as memory. We monitored these same levels again the next day, the day after that, and two weeks after the heading session in the lab.

We found that football heading resulted in immediate and measurable changes in brain function. Increased inhibition in the brain was detected after just a single session of heading. Memory test performance was also reduced by between 41 and 67%.

The good news is that these changes in brain function were transient, with effects normalising within 24 hours. The bad news is that we do not know whether there is an accumulative effect when this biochemical disruption is repeated over and over again through weekly heading practice drills, or what the long-term consequences of heading on brain health are. This is why further research is needed.

 

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