Heading the soccer ball too frequently may cause damage to the brain, according to new research.
In smaller numbers, there doesn’t seem to be a problem. It’s when the number of headers reaches about 1,300 per year that the brain may begin to suffer traumatic brain damage.
Numbers that high may seem excessive, but not for players regularly honing their skills on the field through practice.
“Practice turns out to be a much bigger source of exposure than actual games,” says Dr. Michael Lipton, the lead study author and Director of Radiology Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. “Some people were reporting heading 5,000 times a year.”
