Baseball, basketball, soccer and other sports also experienced declines in that age group, though football's drop was much steeper than most.Ī few institutions are also responding to health and safety concerns: The New York City Council on Friday held a public hearing over a proposal to require doctors to be present at all youth games, and trainers or doctors at all full-contact practices. The study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, comes as participation in youth football has been declining: From 2008 to 2013, the number of children ages 6 to 12 participating regularly in football fell 29 percent, to 1.3 million, according to the Sports & Fitness Industry Association, which commissions an annual household survey of sport participation rates. He also called for additional studies with larger sample sizes.Ī spokesman from the NFL could not be reached for immediate comment. The players who started the game later lasted slightly longer in the NFL, 8.67 years compared with 7.02 years. The subjects were split up in a manner so that each group played a similar number of years in tackle football, with a similar number of concussions. They're trying to say it's the age of first exposure that is the problem, when it's more likely cumulative exposure." Stern said the study was designed to control for that factor. "I think what probably happened is lots of them get no concussions in youth, but three in high school, five in college and 10 in the NFL. "There's absolutely no information on the number of concussions that the had in high school or college, or the severity of the concussions," he said. Julian Bailes, chairman of its medical advisory committee and co-director of the Northshore Neurological Institute in Evanston, Illinois, told "Outside the Lines" that the sample is too small to draw any conclusions from, and that the results of NFL players cannot be compared to that of athletes who never made it to that level. The top medical official for Pop Warner, the nation's largest and oldest youth football organization, dismissed the study as "flawed." Dr. The logic is you shouldn't hurt your brain over and over and over again as a child." "But it does suggest something that I think makes logical sense. "We have findings from former NFL players, so it can't be generalizable to the rest of the football-playing public," Stern said. During those early years, the brain is rapidly building connections between neurons. The authors concluded that incurring repeated head impacts in football between the ages of 10 and 12, a critical and sensitive window for brain development, may increase the risk of later-life cognitive impairment. They had problems with being flexible in their decision-making and problem-solving." "They had problems learning and remembering lists of words. Robert Stern, lead author and a professor of neurology and neurosurgery. "They were worse on all the tests we looked at," said Dr. The study is published in Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. Researchers tested 42 retired players between the ages of 40 and 69 and found that those who started playing football prior to age 12 performed "significantly worse" on three measures: estimated verbal IQ executive function, which includes reasoning and planning and memory impairment. You have reached a degraded version of because you're using an unsupported version of Internet Explorer.įor a complete experience, please upgrade or use a supported browserįormer NFL players who played tackle football as young children were more likely to have thinking and memory problems as adults, a Boston University study published Wednesday in a medical journal found.
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