Football may be more dangerous for women than men because their brains are more susceptible to damage when hitting the ball, a new study says.
In a new study that looked at nearly 100 amatuer players, women showed five times more brain tissue damage than men on scans.
Women’s soccer is on the rise and soccer is now the largest women’s team sport in the UK, with almost three million players participating each year.
But researchers from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York have warned that this group can cause similar damage to the brain’s white matter during a traumatic brain injury.
And experts now fear that repeated headings of the ball could lead to cognitive decline and behavioral changes. Many players have developed dementia including Jeff Astle and Jimmy Hill.
The ball can lead to cognitive decline and change the behavior of female players.
“In general, men do more than women, but we wanted to specifically test whether men and women have similar or different fares with similar exposure to repeated impact to the head.” Lead author of the study Michael Lipton said.
In both groups, this effect we saw in the white matter of the brain increased in greater numbers, but women exhibited five times more microstructural abnormalities than men when they had group exposures. the same.
“Our study provides preliminary support that women are more sensitive to these types of heading effects at the microscopic level of brain tissue.”
Dr. Lipton and his team used advanced brain imaging techniques to evaluate small brain white matter changes in 49 men and 49 female amateur soccer players with an average age of 25. People.
The scan detects subtle brain damage by measuring the diffusion of water in the white matter , known as fractional anisotropy (FA).
The more uniform the water diffusion, the better the microstructural integrity of the tissue. Look for an area with low FA, which indicates structural damage to the brain.
The scans showed that while both men and women had lower FA values relative to the more repeat group, women had lower FA levels across a large amount of brain tissue.
“Our study is larger and more gender-balanced than any previous imaging study on sexuality and brain injury, ” said lead doctoral student Todd Rubin, of the Diagnostic Psychiatric Laboratory. at Albert Einstein, added.
“The findings add to the growing body of evidence that men and women exhibit distinct biological responses to brain injury.”
Women have lower FA levels across a large amount of brain tissue.
Researchers have speculated that the larger injuries could be caused by differences in neck strength, sex hormones, or even genetics.
While the group did not call for a ban, they did call for more research to find out how many times it is safe to head to the ball.
“Rather than banning the team outright, which is probably impractical, we wanted a better handle on how many titles would get players in trouble ,” added Dr Lipton.
Limiting the number of titles allowed in football could have a similar benefit in preventing head injuries.
It is important in this study that men and women may need to be looked at differently.