A new study has found no evidence that the high dementia risk among footballers is linked to health and lifestyle factors.
It increases the likelihood that heading footballs has caused brain injuries.
The research was led by Glasgow University’s Professor Willie Stewart, who five years ago discovered footballers were three-and-a-half times more likely to die from a neurodegenerative disease than the normal population.
“Our data suggests this relationship between higher rates of neurodegenerative disease among former professional footballers is not driven by those wider general health and lifestyle factors, widely recognised as dementia risk factors,” said Professor Stewart.
“In the past, we would say that we felt the strongest risk was probably to do with head injuries and head impacts in sport, but we couldn’t be certain that their relationship to alcohol. smoking, diabetes or blood pressure – these other risk factors might be involved.
“Now, we actually know, having looked at the data, that these other risk factors don’t appear to be contributing to the dementia risk.”
