LONDON: Rugby and soccer players who suffer multiple knocks to the head during their careers are at added risk of brain damage that could lead to dementia and other neurodegenerative diseases, brain scientists are warning.
Just as some American football players and boxers have been found to have long-term cognitive deficits after suffering repeated head blows or concussions during play, so soccer and rugby players must be made aware of the same dangers.
“What happens is that when you have a big impact, your skull twists one way but your brain stays in the same place,” said John Hardy, chair of Molecular Biology of Neurological Disease at University College London’s Institute of Neurology.
These injuries, he said, common among boxers, American National Football League (NFL) and ice hockey players, as well as soccer and rugby players, can cause damage to the brain similar to abnormalities found in people with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia.
“We need to minimise the risks by coming down very heavily on tackles and behaviours that are likely to cause rotational injury to the brain,” Hardy said.
Such concerns have echoed across sport in recent days, particularly after English soccer club Tottenham Hotspur controversially allowed goalkeeper Hugo Lloris to play on even after he was knocked out in a collision with a striker. Luke Griggs, a spokesman for the brain injury charity Headway, said the decision displayed an “irresponsible and cavalier attitude to a player’s health”. By playing on, he said, Lloris may have caused greater damage to his brain. “He should have been removed from the game immediately and taken to hospital for thorough tests and observation.”
Brain scientists and medical experts agree. At an international conference on concussion in sport last year, specialist doctors working in sport drafted a consensus saying that no player, regardless of the sport, should return to the field of play on the day of a concussive injury.
Yet the problem there, says Willie Stewart, a consultant neuropathologist at Glasgow’s Southern General Hospital who is due to speak at a professional rugby concussion forum in London this week, is that diagnosing concussion is a far lengthier and more complex process than many people assume.
“People believe you have to be knocked unconscious to have concussion, but there are many other symptoms of concussion too,” Stewart said in an interview.
These include headaches, nausea, lack of awareness and blurred or confused vision - but some, many, or all of these symptoms may not appear straight away, he said, and often take hours or even days to appear.
Which makes a five-minute pitch side assessment, be it in rugby, soccer, NFL or elsewhere, a fairly unhelpful approach if an accurate diagnosis is to be made.
“The rule should be ‘if in doubt, sit them out’,” said Stewart.” And if you have enough suspicion that a player is concussed to want to conduct a pitch side assessment, then there’s enough doubt there already to take them out of play.”
Reuters
