At first glance, heading shots may seem harmless to our health, as we may think that they are simply impact forces or have insufficient accelerations to produce symptoms associated with concussion.
However, in recent years, awareness has significantly increased in the sports world about the long-term consequences of head impacts. This applies not only to football, but also to other disciplines such as rugby, boxing and especially American football.
It was in the NFL that concern arose about a problem that football now wants to address. It all began in 2017, with a study led by Boston University that revealed that 110 of the 111 brains of American football players analysed post-mortem showed signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
The big shock for football came from a study conducted by the University of Glasgow in 2019 , which concluded that professional footballers are five times more likely to develop Alzheimer's and twice as likely to develop Parkinson's than the general population.
The research was led by Dr Willie Stewart, who emphasised the importance of his results: "Our data show that footballers have higher rates of dementia, but are less likely to die from other common diseases." And at the same time as it has been revealed that they are more likely to suffer from neurodegenerative diseases, they are also less likely to suffer from heart attacks or certain types of cancer.
The English Football Association (FA), which commissioned the study, reacted almost immediately: it banned children under 12 from heading the ball during training. The other British federations quickly followed suit.
Following these studies, many other independent studies have emerged that have raised concerns about the consequences of heading the ball. For example, results presented at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) shed new light on this controversial topic and suggested that repeatedly using the head to hit the ball may have consequences for brain function.
When this head impact is repeated, athletes perform worse in coordination, memory and cognition tests compared to those who only kick. In this regard, the JAMA Ophthalmology magazine details that 10 impacts of this type are enough for brain capacities to be impaired.
Furthermore, athletes who have already suffered a concussion are more vulnerable to experiencing this injury again in the future. Manuel Domínguez, a neurology specialist and head of the Epilepsy and Dementia Units at the Gómez Ulla Central Defense Hospital, clarifies that “the tissue that has already suffered is more fragile, so it is more prone to it happening again.”
For his part, Jesús Porta, vice president of the Spanish Society of Neurology (SEN), explains that "in children, the brain is in the process of developing plasticity. That is to say, when the brain is still forming, repeated traumas to the head can cause a greater risk of developing future pathologies. This is something that has not yet been scientifically proven, but it is more than reasonable to think, in view of the studies carried out, that this is the case."
