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Want To Save Kids' Brains? Then Ban Tackle Football For Preteens

This article is more than 9 years old.

The longer they'd played football, the harder it was for them to remember.

That's the chief finding of a new study on how youth football changed NFL players' brains — the latest signal that playing tackle football can have long-lasting, damaging effects.

Also See: NFL Players Have 30% Chance Of Alzheimer's, Dementia

For the new study, published in Neurology on Tuesday, researchers from the Boston University School of Medicine quizzed 42 ex-NFL players who were between ages 40 and 69, and already were showing signs of cognitive decline.

Half the players started playing tackle football before age 12 — and these men collectively performed about 20% worse on the battery of tests, like remembering a list of words or making decisions.

The researchers concluded that NFL players who suffered repeated head impacts at a young age, when neural connections were rapidly forming, were more at risk of cognitive impairment later in life. And the findings are why experts like Dr. Robert Cantu — who's considered the nation's top concussion researcher — have spent several years advocating a ban on collision sports for children.

The study has its critics. Pop Warner is the nation's most popular youth football program, and its top medical official told ESPN's "Outside the Lines" that the sample size is too small and not applicable to all Americans.

(On the second point, the Boston University researchers would agree: They stressed that their findings apply only to NFL players, and it's too soon to know the effect of youth football on boys who only played tackle football through high school or college. But it maps to many other findings about the effects of collision sports for children, and it's worth noting that Pop Warner has a bias for self-preservation here: Its popularity is noticeably flagging.)

Boston University's study also is a brutal reminder that youth football isn't child's play. "Youth football players ages 9–12 can incur an average of 240, and up to 585, head impacts per season at magnitudes that parallel those experienced by high school and collegiate football players," the researchers warned.

But the only surprise about the study, really, is that it hadn't been done before. Because when it comes to the NFL, we increasingly know the score: Playing tackle football's bad on the body, and maybe worse on the brain.

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