Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Entertainment/2014 February 13

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February 13

Indian Olympic athletes

With the reinstatement of the Indian Olympic Association by the IOC, the two Indian athletes remaining to compete will be allowed to represent their country. However, luger Shiva Keshavan already competed as an Independent Olympic Participant. Will the official records list him as representing India, or as an IOP?    → Michael J Ⓣ Ⓒ Ⓜ 18:09, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

He's now listed as having represented India on the official Sochi 2014 website. See here: [1] (he's 35th out of 39 participants in that run). --Xuxl (talk) 21:40, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

Heading the ball in soccer and brain injury

I work in an Australian school which has teams playing Australian rules football, rugby union, and Association football (soccer). A discussion arose yesterday about possible brain injury from these sports. Because they are obvious contact sports, it's clear there is such a risk in the first two, but the question arose about soccer (I'll stick to that name because that's what we call it here). I have seen some reports over the years that repetitive heading of a soccer ball over a long playing career can cause brain injury, but how true is it? Are there definitive studies? If it is a risk, what can be done about it?

Please don't interpret this as a request for medical advice. It's a more a question of "were do I look"?HiLo48 (talk) 23:45, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

The term you should start searching for is Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which is medical speech for "repeated head injuries that turn your brain to spongecake". While I don't know how it relates to the use of the head in soccer, I have seen studies with regards to American football, where the topic has been a major focus of all levels of the sport for several years. Sports Illustrated has done many articles as the issue relates to American football; for example this is a recent (Oct 2013) series of articles they devoted to the topic from several perspectives. As it might relate to heading the ball in soccer, however, you may find this article from 2011 to be most useful. It looked at a study which noticed a marked effect from repeated non-injurious head injuries (that is, hits to the head which are too light to result in a concussion. Let me quote the most striking passage from that article. "But when the researchers started dragging in apparently healthy non-concussed players for memory tests and fMRI's to establish a control group, they were surprised to discover that several players had impaired brain functioning despite not having suffered a concussion. Ultimately, the study found that the sheer number of hits that a player had taken over the previous week, completely irrespective of whether a concussion had been suffered, was the best predictor of brain impairment." In other words, impaired brain function was measurable in players of American football who took repeated (though minor) hits to the head; perhaps similar to what may occur to a soccer player who repeatedly heads the ball. --Jayron32 00:02, 14 February 2014 (UTC)

"Researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University in New York recently completed a study in which they used MRI to take images of the brains of 37 amateur adult soccer players who had played the sport since childhood.

They found that players who said they frequently headed the ball had abnormalities in their brains that resembled those found in patients with concussion or mild traumatic brain injuries."[2]

The followup study, "Soccer Headers Can Lead to Brain Injury", gives more details. Clarityfiend (talk) 02:34, 14 February 2014 (UTC)

Not really much to do with the research side but a school in Melbourne has banned leather footballs (soccer and Australian rules) because of the potential risk of head injury.[3] Hack (talk) 05:00, 14 February 2014 (UTC)

Some rather older research at Soccer injuries to the brain. A neurologic and electroencephalographic study of former players, which studied thirty seven former football players of the Norwegian national team and found that "The high incidence of EEC (ie electroencephalographic) changes is probably the result of a cumulative effect due to repeated head traumas." Alansplodge (talk) 11:33, 14 February 2014 (UTC)

I read a comprehensive article from The Guardian newspaper (link below). Searching its website for 'rugby death head injury' brought up more articles on the same subject which could be of interest to you http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2013/dec/13/death-of-a-schoolboy-ben-robinson-concussion-rugby-union 83.104.128.107 (talk) 13:40, 14 February 2014 (UTC)

Brain injury as a result of repetitive heading of a football was given at the inquest as the cause of death of the footballer Jeff Astle (my hero). Bear in mind that when Astle ruled West Bromwich Albion, footballs were made of leather and absorbed water, so a wet football could cause damage to the human head. --TammyMoet (talk) 19:21, 14 February 2014 (UTC)