• Posted September 22, 2025

Heading A Soccer Ball Linked To Poorer Brain Health

“Heading” the ball might affect amateur soccer players’ brain health, a new study says.

Players who used their heads to pass or deflect a soccer ball were more likely to develop changes within the folds of their brains, researchers reported Sept. 17 in the journal Neurology. These folds are in the wrinkly outer area of the brain called the cerebral cortex.

Athletes with more of these brain changes performed worse on cognitive tests, researchers said.

“People who experienced more impacts from headers had more disruptions within a specific layer in the folds of the brain, and that these disruptions were also linked to poorer performance on thinking and memory tests,” senior researcher Dr. Michael Lipton, a professor of radiology with Columbia University said in a news release.

The study adds more evidence to concerns over how sports-related head impacts and concussions affect players’ brain health, researchers said.

For the study, researchers performed brain scans on 352 amateur soccer players in the greater New York City area, as well as 77 other athletes participating in non-collision sports. Amateur players in the study were 26 years old on average.

The soccer players were divided into four groups based on how often they headed the ball during play. The highest group had an average of 3,152 headers per year, compared to 105 headers in the lowest group.

Scans showed greater changes in white matter located within the folds of the brain, called the "depths of sulci," among soccer players who headed the ball most often.

As the number of headers increased, this white matter area became more disrupted, researchers said. Disruptions particularly affected the orbitofrontal brain region located just above the eye sockets.

Thinking and memory tests revealed worse learning and memory performance among the soccer players who had more disruptions in white matter, results show.

“Our findings suggest that this layer of white matter in the folds of the brain is vulnerable to repeated trauma from heading and may be an important place to detect brain injury,” Lipton said.

“More research is needed to further explore this relationship and develop approaches that could lead to early detection of sports-related head trauma,” Lipton added.

More information

The American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons has more on sports concussion.

SOURCE: American Academy of Neurology, news release, Sept. 19, 2025