Discussions surrounding the effects playing soccer can have on an athlete’s cognitive skills usually focus on unintentional head impacts such as an elbow to the head. However, according to a new study published in Frontiers in Neurology, heading the ball is much more closely associated with affecting cognitive performance than unintentional impacts.
The authors tested how heading —when a player purposefully moves the ball with his or her own head—and unintentional head impacts affect the neuropsychological (NP) test performance of more than 300 adult amateur soccer players. All players said they play soccer six months out of the year or more. Seventy-eight percent of study participants were male.
The players completed a questionnaire about their last two weeks of soccer activity and then completed NP tests focused on “verbal learning, verbal memory, psychomotor speed, attention and working memory.” Overall, heading was significantly associated with poorer performance on tasks related to psychomotor speed and attention. There was a borderline association between heading and poorer performance of the player’s working memory. On the other hand, there were no significant associations found between unintentional head impacts and any NP tests.
“Higher levels of heading were associated with poorer performance on cognitive tasks that emphasized psychomotor speed, attention, and working memory,” wrote author Michael L. Lipton, MD, PhD, department of radiology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York, and colleagues. “Notably, these domains of cognitive function are most dependent on normal structure and functioning of brain white matter tracts, the demonstrated location of pathology in concussion and also implicated, independent of concussion, in our study of soccer heading.”
Lipton et al. noted that there was still much more to learn about this topic. “Questions remain about the temporal relation, magnitude (e.g., frequency, intensity), and nature (i.e., linear versus rotational) of heading required to modify cognitive function, the persistence of the effect, and whether there are carryover effects mediated by long-term intensity of exposure,” the authors wrote. “Answers to these questions may be important to managing risk of long-term effects from heading and underscore the need for long-term follow-up.”
Michael has more than 16 years of experience as a professional writer and editor. He has written at length about cardiology, radiology, artificial intelligence and other key healthcare topics.