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240 Head Hits: The Average a 10-Year Old Can Get in a Football Season

Coinciding with Super Bowl week, the journal Neurology just came out with a study by Boston University researchers that looked at retired professional football players, comparing the cognitive functioning of players who had started tackle football before age 12 with others who hadn’t.

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American


Coinciding with Super Bowl week, the journal Neurology just came out with a study by Boston University researchers that looked at retired professional football players, comparing the cognitive functioning of players who had started tackle football before age 12 with others who hadn't. Here is a summary of the findings, encapsulated in an accompanying editorial published in the same issue:

Forty-two former NFL players were studied, of whom half had been exposed to tackle football before age 12 and half had not. The mean age of the study participants was 52, and the total number of concussions was similar between the groups. Neuropsychological testing was conducted to measure executive function, memory and intelligence, domains commonly affected not only in mild traumatic brain injury but also in late-life dementia. Results indicated the players exposed to football before age 12 had greater impairment on all measures compared to the players who began to play football at age 12 or later.

The study was small and didn't do similar comparisons for former players whose football careers ended after high school. Still, a few other sentences from the editorial might give some parents pause about whether their kid should be going out for the team.


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Football has the highest injury rate among team sports, and given that 70 percent of all football players in the United States are under the age of 14 and that every child 9-12 can be exposed to 240 head impacts during a single football season, a better understanding of neurobehavioral sequelae among children who play football is urgently needed.

Dunno. While waiting for those studies to be conducted, do you really want your kid taking 240 head bangs each fall (estimated upper bound is 585 hits)? Not just love taps either: "head impacts per season that parallel the magnitudes experienced by high school and collegiate football players." What about track and field?

Gary Stix, Scientific American's neuroscience and psychology editor, commissions, edits and reports on emerging advances and technologies that have propelled brain science to the forefront of the biological sciences. Developments chronicled in dozens of cover stories, feature articles and news stories, document groundbreaking neuroimaging techniques that reveal what happens in the brain while you are immersed in thought; the arrival of brain implants that alleviate mood disorders like depression; lab-made brains; psychological resilience; meditation; the intricacies of sleep; the new era for psychedelic drugs and artificial intelligence and growing insights leading to an understanding of our conscious selves. Before taking over the neuroscience beat, Stix, as Scientific American's special projects editor, oversaw the magazine's annual single-topic special issues, conceiving of and producing issues on Einstein, Darwin, climate change, nanotechnology and the nature of time. The issue he edited on time won a National Magazine Award. Besides mind and brain coverage, Stix has edited or written cover stories on Wall Street quants, building the world's tallest building, Olympic training methods, molecular electronics, what makes us human and the things you should and should not eat. Stix started a monthly column, Working Knowledge, that gave the reader a peek at the design and function of common technologies, from polygraph machines to Velcro. It eventually became the magazine's Graphic Science column. He also initiated a column on patents and intellectual property and another on the genesis of the ingenious ideas underlying new technologies in fields like electronics and biotechnology. Stix is the author with his wife, Miriam Lacob, of a technology primer called Who Gives a Gigabyte: A Survival Guide to the Technologically Perplexed (John Wiley & Sons, 1999).

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