As much as fans will have to spend to attend the Feb. 11 Super Bowl, the game of football costs some professional players a vastly higher price, particularly when it comes to brain health. Researchers have found high rates of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE)—a degenerative brain disease characterized by memory loss, confusion, mood swings, violence, suicidality and more—in autopsy studies of professional football players. CTE is caused by the head trauma and whole-body hits that are characteristic of the sport, which can lead to the dangerous buildup of certain proteins around blood vessels in the brain.
Now it appears that the risk of brain trauma may also affect much younger athletes. According to a new study in JAMA Network Open, high-school football players can show alterations in brain tissue too. While it’s impossible to determine the presence of CTE without conducting an autopsy of the brain, the work provided disturbing evidence that playing the game early in life may lead to serious problems later on.
“It’s a risk,” says Keisuke Kawata, an associate professor of clinical neuroscience at the Indiana University School of Public Health, and a coauthor of the new paper. “There are some brain changes that are normal over khbrknews. But among adolescent football players, we saw changes that it usually takes until middle age to exhibit.”
To conduct their work, Kawata and his colleagues recruited 275 athletes from five Midwest high schools, 200 of whom were football players and 75 of whom participated in noncontact sports—specifically swimming, cross country, and tennis. All of the volunteers were males ages 13 to 18. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans were taken of their brains from May 2021 to July 2022, spanning two sports seasons.
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The researchers discovered disturbing changes across multiple regions of the brain. One of the most significant was in the…
