The case for the Professional Footballers' Association to pay for independent research into whether repeatedly heading a football can affect the brain was "strengthened on Monday by details of a little known Harvard research project involving 12 German footballers," according to Ian Herbert of the London INDEPENDENT. The U.S. is "far ahead" of the U.K. in its investigations into possible links and after a series of reports -- "prompted by the early-onset dementia which has left former England World Cup winner Nobby Stiles desperately frail" -- it can be revealed that the Harvard Medical School investigation showed "faintly perceptible changes in the white matter of the brain of all 12 players it examined." The research project compared the brains of the German right-handed players with those of eight "elite" swimmers. The study found that the footballers' frontal, temporal and occipital lobes were "altered, compared to the swimmers." These regions of the brain are known to be responsible for "attention, visual processing, higher order thinking and memory." It was not established whether heading the ball repeatedly "caused the change in the tissue formation," though Harvard scientists said that their work did "demonstrate the need for further research" (INDEPENDENT, 2/13).
