The scientific evidence is increasingly unquestionable: soccer players are more likely to suffer from neurodegenerative diseases later in life, such as dementia or Alzheimer’s. In recent years, studies have been published around the world that reveal these additional risks, which derive from the constant hitting of balls with the head, and for the first time, an investigation in Spain, at the Hospital Clinic in Barcelona, points to the same conclusion.
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Participated in Journal of NeurologyThe study, coordinated by hospital neurologist Alex Iranzo, confirms that playing football at a professional level – or the equivalent in terms of intensity and frequency – is a predisposing factor for REM sleep disturbances, which in turn often means the first manifestation of diseases such as dementia. or Parkinson’s disease. “In contact sports, repeated exposure to head blows can lead to progressive neurological loss,” says the doctor. “This would explain why football professionals can develop different types of neurodegenerative diseases decades after retirement,” says Iranzo, who is also chair of the clinical neurophysiology group at the Auguste Baie Sauniere Institute for Biomedical Research (IDIBAPS).
The risk of dementia in football has reached public debate in countries such as the United Kingdom or the United States, where football associations have banned head-banging in children. Indeed, in North American sports, awareness is greater due to the more serious problems experienced by former American football players, and it is one of the most contact sports. In Spain, at the moment, there are only recommendations in this regard.
The Clínic study was conducted with patients who were treated at the Sleep Disorders Center of the Neurology Service between 1994 and 2022. Of the 338 people diagnosed with REM sleep disorder, 228 were men, 34% of whom ended up with some form of neurodegenerative disease. . This type of sleep disorder, Iranzo specifies, causes “rigid” motor behaviors, nightmares, and a lack of muscle relaxation.
Regarding the patients studied, what Clínic discovered was that six of them, 2.63%, were professional footballers, with a career of 13 years on average and 40 years since they closed their boots and the first symptoms of footballers appeared. The percentage, albeit small, contrasts with the percentage of soccer players in the general population, which is 0.06%, according to the hospital. “The association between neurodegenerative diseases and head injuries leads us to speculate that for the retired soccer players in our study group, exposure to these repeated blows to the head may be a factor,” says Iranzo.
The Clínic study appears in the same month that one of the most ambitious investigations in history regarding this problem was published. The Lancet Public Health A study conducted in Sweden was published on 6,007 soccer players who played between 1924 and 2019, and confirmed that they are 1.5 times more likely to develop this type of disease. Of those analyzed, 9% were diagnosed with neurodegenerative diseases, compared to 6% in the control groups. What’s even more curious is that when analyzing goalkeepers, the ratio was between the two, at 7.5%.
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