Playing Early-Age Football May Lead To Brain Risk, Study

New research shows that 40 former NFL players in the range of 40 to 65 years have been found to have a greater tendency to altered brain development, as they began to play football before they turned 12, according to bostonglobe.

Researchers at Boston University School of Medicine and Brigham and Women's Hospital showed a link between "repetitive head impacts early in life and structural brain changes later in life," said researchers.

The study has been released at a time when youth football has come down, even as there are concerns about "possible brain damage" due to continuous head trauma.

The team leader of the study, Dr. Robert Stern, however, said that it does not specifically show any long-term dangers for children who played tackle football. After all, the survey involved just a few members, and moreover, the professionals have been examined, he said.

"But it is a beginning,'' said Stern, a professor and director of the BU Alzheimer's Disease Center and director of clinical research for the school's Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy Center. "What it tells us is that we need to think rationally about when is it more or less likely that sustaining repetitive hits to the head [as children] will result in later-life problems.''

The study found that being hit during the crucial preteen brain development phase "may disrupt neurodevelopmental processes' and lead to 'greater vulnerability to ageing processes," according to dailymail.

Researchers said that there has been some evidence showing a "critical window'' of brain development for children aged between 10 and 12, when the brain might get prone to injury.

"This development process may be disrupted by repeated head impacts in childhood possibly leading to lasting changes in brain structure," said Julie Stamm, who conducted the study as part of her doctoral dissertation at BU and now is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.

The study, which appears online in the Journal of Neurotrauma, was funded by the National Institutes of Health.

"The results of this study do not confirm a cause-and-effect relationship, only that there is an association between younger age of first exposure to tackle football and abnormal brain imaging patterns later in life," said Martha Shenton, a professor and director of the psychiatry neuroimaging laboratory at Brigham and Women's.

Stern lauded youth sports and said that research has not really shown the best age to play tackle football, and added: "Regardless of the results of this study, doesn't it just make sense that children whose brains are rapidly developing should not be hitting their heads over and over again?''