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Whether in practice games or competition, soccer players who frequently head the ball are three times more likely to have concussion symptoms than players who don't rack up high numbers of headers, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Neurology.
When a bump, blow or jolt to the head or a hit to the body causes the head and brain to move rapidly back and forth, this can lead to concussion, a type of traumatic brain injury. The brain bouncing or twisting in the skull creates chemical changes in the brain and sometimes damages cells, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Dr. Michael L. Lipton, senior author of the study and a professor of radiology and of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, noted one important reason why he conducted the research: "There's like over a quarter of a billion people in the world who play soccer, and most of those people are the kind of people we study," he said of adults in recreational leagues.
"It's a huge number of people. So if there is an effect on the brain -- and as the data comes in, it's increasingly looking like there is -- that's potentially a big public health issue."