Posts Tagged ‘soccer’
By Paul Stone On September 25th, 2014
Hilderaldo Bellini may not be a household name like his teammate Pelé, but soccer fans are likely to be familiar with the name. The Brazilian soccer star led the country’s team to win the 1958 World Cup and is memorialized in a statue at the entrance of the Estádio do Maracanã in Rio de Janeiro.…
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By Paul Stone On July 10th, 2014
This weekend the World Cup will come to an end as Germany and Argentina square off for the championship, but this year’s tournament has created its fair share of controversy that seems likely to hang over the sport moving forward. The biggest controversy likely to haunt FIFA when the World Cup springs back into action…
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By Paul Stone On June 20th, 2014
Since the discovery that soccer is linked to high rates of brain injuries similar to those found in football and hockey players, the assumption has been that the brain damage was associated with the repeated “headers”, or a player using their head to direct the ball. This assumption isn’t entirely baseless, several researchers have shown…
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By Paul Stone On June 9th, 2014
The increased awareness and criticism around how brain injuries are handled within sports is far from an American issue. Several countries around the world are reevaluating their favorite sports in hopes of protecting athletes brains, including rugby, hockey, and soccer. With the World Cup less than a week away, the pressure on soccer is beginning…
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By Paul Stone On June 6th, 2014
The brain injury problem in sports largely focuses on concussions, but the recent research suggests that mild traumatic brain injuries like concussions aren’t the only cause of the long-term brain damage being found in many older athletes. It is quickly being found that so-called “sub-concussive hits” or repeated hits that do not cause clinically diagnosable…
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By Paul Stone On June 11th, 2013
Dr. Michael Lipton, associate director of Gruss Magnetic Resonance Research Center at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, isn’t the first doctor to suggest that repeated “heading” of a soccer ball could be potentially dangerous to brain health, but he did lead the latest study to back up that theory. Heading is a common soccer move…
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By Paul Stone On February 28th, 2013
Soccer has a concussion problem rivaling that of the NFL, but it is less publicized because American’s just don’t seem to care about soccer and sadly the fact that majority of TBI sufferers in the sport are female may be contributing to the low profile. Most likely, these incidents of traumatic brain injury aren’t coming…
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By Paul Stone On November 22nd, 2012
A small study of soccer players suggests that repetitive hits to the head below the threshold for causing a traumatic brain injury may still result in changes to the brain’s white matter. Soccer players regularly hit the ball with their head to direct it, which is referred to as “heading the ball” or a “header.”…
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