Youth soccer may be more unsafe than parents think.
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More than 1 in 4 concussions studied occurred when players used their heads to hit the ball. It is important to note, though, that this concern is probably not from heading the ball, but rather from colliding with other players.
But about 78 percent and about 62 percent of heading-relate concussions among boys and girls, respectively, were due to contact with another player.
Comstock and her colleagues report in JAMA Pediatrics that players are more likely to get concussions during heading than other soccer plays, but it’s not the cause of theinjuries.
The recent soccer victory by the USA team in the Women’s World Cup was a proud day for America.
That could have benefits for the thousands of children who are involved in the sport, given the surge in popularity of high school soccer in recent decades. “Rather, it’s athlete-to-athlete contact that occurs during heading”. Using that data, the authors compared the number of concussions boys and girls sustained while playing soccer to the number of athletic exposures-defined as one high school athlete participating in one school-sanctioned soccer practice or competition.
About 78 per cent of header-related concussions for boys in US high school games were caused by collisions with another player, according to a study published Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association’s JAMA Pediatrics journal.
Player-on-player contact was the most common cause of concussions overall, they found.
But says Comstock: “If the rules of soccer were simply enforced better, we would actually be more successful in reducing concussion rates”.
So, she suggested, “if you just enforce these rules you would dramatically reduce aggressive body contact, and dramatically lower the concussion rate, without having to change the culture of the sport by eliminating heading itself”. But headers, which require players to redirect the ball with their head, were the most unsafe individual move, responsible for almost a third of concussions for boys and more than a quarter for girls.
“When you look extra deeply in the info, it’s not the act of athletes hitting the balls with their heads in any respect”, Comstock stated. The study included older teens and some middle-school aged kids younger than 14 who played at the high school level.
The results led the authors to suggest “previous researchers discussing the safety and risk of soccer headers may have been asking the wrong question”, as “banning heading is unlikely to eliminate athlete-athlete contact or the resultant injuries“.
“I’m a soccer fan and a major supporter of youth athletics of all different types”, he said. Also, under age 14 is when the maximum development of the brain occurs.
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Chris Nowinski, co-founder of the Sports Legacy Institute, noted that a degenerative brain disease linked with repeated head blows and more often associated with football has recently been found in autopsies of professional soccer players.
