Heading soccer balls can be dangerous

- via Fox News Latino

Regularly heading a soccer ball — even just a few times a day — can lead to brain injury, an American study said Tuesday.

Researchers used an advanced MRI-based imaging technique to scan the brains of 38 amateur soccer players then compared the images to the number of times they headed the ball during the past year.

Players who frequently headed the ball showed brain injuries similar to those seen in patients with concussions, with researchers from New York’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore Medical Center reporting “significant injury” in those players who exceeded 1,000 to 1,500 headers per year.

“While heading a ball 1,000 or 1,500 times a year may seem high to those who don’t participate in the sport, it only amounts to a few times a day for a regular player,” lead author Michael Lipton said.