April 26 – A new dementia study has been launched to investigate how to reduce risk of the disease in ex-players.
The study will be led by Dr Willie Stewart, whose previous research showed former professionals are three and a half times more likely to die of dementia than the general population.
The new four-year, £1.3 million study is being jointly funded by the FA and FIFA, and will recruit 120 ex-professional footballers aged 40-59.
The study will use brain imaging and tests to compare brain health in former footballers to 700 control subjects from the general population.
“This is an incredibly important study, and we are grateful to the FA and FIFA for their support to allow it to proceed,” the BBC quoted Stewart, consultant neuropathologist at the University of Glasgow, as saying.
Last August English football published recommended limits on heading for professional and amateur players in training but Stewart was critical of those guidelines saying they were based on “unscientific guesswork”.
“There is no basis to say 10 headers of a certain level will necessarily make a great difference to the risk. The FA based their recommendations on analysis of matches, estimated what the forces might be and then used that for training guidance,” he said at the time
“That’s like being stood on the edge of the motorway and guessing cars’ speeds and talking about road traffic measures in a city. It’s not entirely relevant.”
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