Study: Soccer Ball Heading May Affect Women’s Brains More Negatively Than Men

If you’re a woman, ” heading” the soccer ball might affect your brain more negatively than it would for a man, according to new research presented Tuesday at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

Using diffusion tensor imaging (a technique for brain scanning), researchers looked at the brains of 49 male and 49 female amateur soccer players, study author Todd Rubin, an MD/PhD student at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, said at a press conference. This sample came from a larger study in order to compare players matched on metrics like age and heading frequency. Researchers discovered a difference in extent and location of these injuries, and within those locations a different pattern of injury for men and for women.

” … We think we have pretty compelling evidence that we have an objective measure of sex difference in response to heading,” Rubin says.

Next, researchers hope to compare both male and female soccer players to the general population using two other ongoing studies. They want to look at individual soccer players compared to control groups of non-athletes and non-contact sport athletes who are in good cardiovascular health, and to understand the mechanisms underlying sex difference in these injuries. They’re also starting up animal studies of highly repetitive subconcussive head injuries.

Why is there such a difference between men and women? Rubin says researchers can’t tell from their data, but suggests other potential hypotheses include differences in style of play, skull shape and neck strength. It’s very difficult to address different variables in the human population, according to Rubin.

This study was one of several highlighted during the neuroscience annual meeting. One researcher, Melissa McCradden — a former athlete herself, of McMaster University in Canada — concluded that athlete concussions lead to impaired performance on a memory test, but peformance improved once the athlete clinically recovered. McCradden also specifically found that rugby players had memory impairments throughout the season, but saw improvements after a month without playing.

Researchers also commented on the stigma associated with reporting concussions.

“I think that similar to what we’ve done with our health in general in terms of exercise and eating right, if we can create a culture shift around concussion and try to encourage people to take their brain health very seriously and to reinforce that notion that if you take a break, you’re going to be OK,” she said.

These new studies come amid much discussion about a Boston University study released earlier this year which found chronic traumatic encephalopathy ( CTE) in 177 football players across all play levels, including 110 of 111 previous NFL players. CTE refers to the pathological changes discovered in athlete’s brains when they’ve undergone repeated concussions and head injuries.

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