Soccer move can damage brains like other contact sports, study finds

There's a growing body of understanding around the potential brain health risks of contact sports, but a new study suggests people should add soccer to that category.

Repeated head trauma that can be a result of long-term participation in sports like boxing, and contact football has been linked to chronic traumatic encelaphopathy (CTE), a neurodegenerative disease that can only be diagnosed post-mortem.

While the Australian Sports Commission notes more research needs to be done to establish the full context of how a person develops CTE, including genetic and other lifestyle factors, governing bodies for sports such as rugby league, rugby union, and American football have come under pressure over their duty of care to players.

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But even as some wary parents opt to nudge their children away from contact sports into soccer as a safer option, a new study out of the US has warned that a particular act could also be having a marked effect on players' brains.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it's the "header", the act of projecting the ball forward with a headbutt, that is the culprit.

The new study, published by a research team from Columbia University, found that heading the soccer ball could damage an area at the front of the brain dubbed the "orbitofrontal grey matter-white matter interface" (GWI) - a site of changing brain tissue composition.

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Researchers had previously established that repeated head impacts of any sort could be detrimental to the brain, but the precise site where these changes were reflected was not fully understood.

This time, they investigated 352 adult amateur soccer players, aged between 18 and 55, all of whom had played for at least five years and for at least six months a year currently.

Those who had headed the ball more often had measurable changes to their GWI.

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They also performed more poorly on a memory test involving remembering a shopping list of items.

"Soccer is the most popular sport worldwide and, in part due to the practice of heading (i.e, intentionally hitting the ball with the head), may be the greatest source of RHI (repetitive head impacts)," the authors wrote.

The full study can be found online here.

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