Have you ever wondered if footballers are affected by hitting the ball so many heads during games? A group of researchers from Harvard Medical School (USA) and Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich (Germany) asked themselves this question and reached interesting conclusions.
The scientists used image diffusion tensors to compare the brains of twelve elite soccer players with those of eight swimmers, as swimming is a sport with low exposure to blows to the head. The image diffuser technique provides information on the diffusion of water molecules in biological tissue, and thus can reveal details about theirmicroscopic architecture. In the white matter of the brain, responsible for the transmission of messages between neurons, the diffusion of water molecules reflects the coherence, the organization and the density of the fibers, which makes this imaging technique highly sensitive to changes in its architecture.
The results, published in the journalJournal of the American Medical Association, revealed differences in white matter in various parts of the brain responsible for attention, visual processing and memory. “In the study we have included people without a diagnosis of concussion symptoms”, explains Inga K. Koerte, author of the work. “Still, we have found changes in the brains of the playerssimilar to those that occur in patients with mild traumatic injuries“.
“The origin of these changes is not clear,” acknowledges Martha Shenton, one of the authors. “An explanation could be the effect of a brain trauma, although other aspects such as lifestyle can also contribute to the observed results.” Scientists highlight the importance of further research in this line to understand the meaning of the changes produced in the brains of these athletes.
