‘Football players at higher risk of dementia’

PARIS:

Sweden’s football players – with the exception of the athletes – are more likely to develop dementia than the general population in the last century, a major study suggested on Friday.

Experts say the study adds to “substantial evidence” linking the world’s most popular sport to a higher risk of brain damage, and comes as controversy rages over other rules such as football and the NFL.

Although serious brain injuries such as concussions may be less common in soccer than in those sports, the double header of the ball by the soccer players was primarily associated with passion.

The new study, published in the Lancet Public Health journal, analyzed the medical records of more than 6,000 male athletes at the top of Sweden from 1924 to 2019.

The researchers compared their rates of multiple brain damage problems to 56,000 same-aged Swedish men.

The scholars are 1.5 times more likely to have Alzheimer’s disease and other problems than the control group, the study suggested.

An exception was the goalkeepers, who rarely needed to head the ball and did not show an increased incidence of brain damage.

“This finding gives support to the idea that the head of the ball can explain this relationship,” said the author of the study Peter Ueda of Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet in AFP.

Ueda said that this is the largest study done on the subject since a 2019 Scottish study that suggested that soccer players are 3.5 times more likely to develop brain damage.

– ‘Cover the heads of the people’ –

The Swedish study also found that soccer players live longer than men of the same age, which Ueda said could be related to the higher level of physical activity and socioeconomic status that comes with being an athlete. score.

The study found that there was no increase in the incidence of ALS-like diseases among the scholars, and only slightly less effects of Parkinson’s disease.

Ueda warned that the study could not show that playing football directly caused the damage, and that his findings could not be extended to women’s, amateur or youth football.

Because there is a lot of time between football players and the development of these brain problems, most of the players included in the study were active in the middle of the 20th century.