VOA常速英语:研究发现:踢足球容易引发老年痴呆

Ball meets head, that’s just part of the game in soccer, the sport known worldwide as football.

Inside your head, you brain is the consistency of a firm pudding, says John Hardy, professor of neuroscience at University College, London.

“But your blood vessels are just a little bit tougher.And so, if you do a rapid rotation, they act like little cheese wires and do bits of damage around them.”

In American football, hard hits are common, and concern is growing about what that does to players’ brains.But it’s not clear whether frequent head contact that happens in soccer is also a problem.

So Hardy and colleagues study the brains of six longtime soccer players who died with dementia.They found a type of brain damage called chronic traumatic encephalopathy(CTE) in four of them.CTE is different from Alzheimer’s disease, but Hardy says the results are similar.

“I’m certainly they are additive pathology,so if you got a little bit brain damage to do with Alzheimer change and a little bit brain damage to do with CTE,you are more likely to be demented.”

Soccer is the most popular sport in the world with clear health and social benefits.And Hardy says this early stage research is not enough to pull the kids off the soccer field.

“The people we’ve studied, these are people who are professional footballers.Who played football probably every day of their lives for 25 to 30 years, probably many hours a day.This is very different from a casual, weekend player or a school player, it’s just a different order of magnitude of contact.”

British soccer associations have pledged to support more research on the subject.

Steve Baragona, VOA news.