Brain Discount F50 Soccer Sale Online damage in American football linked to head trauma

Brain damage in American football linked to head trauma

American Football is a rough game, but the toll it takes on players' grey matter is only now becoming clear. For the first time, the number of head impacts on the playing field has been linked with cognitive problems and functional brain abnormalities in ex-footballers.

Brain autopsies on retired National Football League (NFL) players have previously shown levels of damage that are higher than those in the general population Discount F50 Soccer Sale Online. Now, this damage has been correlated with performance in tasks related to reasoning, problem solving and planning and highlights the worrying impact of repeated head trauma.

To investigate the relationship between head trauma and cognitive damage, Adam Hampshire of Imperial College London, and his colleagues scanned the brains of 13 retired professional American football players and 60 people who had never played the sport, while they performed a series of cognitive tests in an fMRI machine.

It wasn't an easy task: David Hubbard, who ran the tests at the Applied fMRI Institute in San Diego, California, says they initially had 15 ex-sportsmen, but two were too large to fit in the machine.

Football results

The football players only showed modest deficits on the cognitive tasks, which included tests of planning, spatial awareness, memory and counting, however their brains had to work a lot harder to achieve the same results as the non-footballers.

Regions of the frontal cortices that normally communicate with each other to handle reasoning and planning tasks were far less efficient in the footballers' brains.

"It's almost as if there's a loss of connectivity, like having to shout in a loud room," says Hampshire. "I was surprised by how strong these differences in brain activation actually were. I've analysed all sorts of data sets from many different types of neurological and psychiatric patients. These were probably the strongest results that I have seen."

The abnormal activity was more pronounced in players who reported more episodes of having been taken out of the game after a head injury. It also correlated with how many seasons they had played in the NFL, Hampshire says Nike Top Mercurial For Sale.

Blame game

Hubbard says that all of the ex-players who volunteered for the study say they have problems with their memory and attention. They have all chosen to remain anonymous because of concerns that they might damage ongoing lawsuits against the NFL.

Hampshire's study is published against a backdrop of wide discussion about monitoring the health of NFL players after broadcasting network PBS aired a Frontline documentary last week revealing that the dangers of repeated impacts had been known for some time.

Ann McKee, the Boston University neurologist involved in the documentary, says the work from Hubbard's team shows that enormous headway is being made into understanding how this kind of brain damage happens, and potentially fixing it.

McKee has performed autopsies on the brains of 46 ex-NFL players. She found clear signs of damage in 45 of them - the scars of a condition called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), in which the brain degenerates around unusual accumulations of a rogue protein New Soccer Cleat For Sale.

"[Hampshire's team] has found very impressive abnormalities that mirror the areas of the brain that are damaged in early CTE," McKee says.

Protect your head

There are potential solutions to the problem: For example, Boston electronics start-up MC10 recently launched a wearable, breathable electronic skullcap called the CheckLight with sportswear company Reebok.

It promises to monitor and log every hit to the head a player receives while wearing it. A light on the back of the skullcap turns red when the device senses a hit that goes beyond the danger threshold. MC10 says the device is already being used by sports teams around the country, including the Wayland-Weston Youth Football team in Massachusetts.

Hampshire says it would also be affordable to use fMRI more widely across the professional football league for regular check-ups Buy Nike Magista Shoes Online.

Isaiah Kacyvenski, MC10's director of sports, who played linebacker for the Seattle Seahawks, says he has personally felt the neurological toll of eight years playing football in the NFL.

"I was a pre-med undergrad at Harvard, then went to Harvard Business School before I retired, " he says. "There were definitely differences cognitively and emotionally - a pretty stark contrast from before football to after football. I had to readjust the way I did things - and I'm still adjusting."