Study: Kids Who Play Tackle Football Before Age 12 Develop More Brain Problems

By KEN BELSON SEPT. 19, 2017

Athletes who began playing tackle football before the age of 12 had more behavioral and cognitive problems later in life than those who started playing after they turned 12, a new study released on Tuesday showed.

The findings, from a long-term study conducted by researchers at Boston University, are likely to add to the debate over when, or even if, children should be allowed to begin playing tackle football.

The results of the study by researchers at Boston University, published in the journal Nature’s Translational Psychiatry, was based on a sample of 214 former players, with an average age of 51. Of those, 43 played through high school, 103 played through college and the remaining 68 played in the N.F.L.

In phone interviews and online surveys, the researchers found that players in all three groups who participated in youth football before the age of 12 had a twofold “risk of problems with behavioral regulation, apathy and executive function” and a threefold risk of “clinically elevated depression scores.”

-snip-

Children who take up American football early 'at greater risk of brain impairment'

Boston University researchers find those who start playing before 12 twice as likely to develop emotional and cognitive difficulties as those who start later

Jessica Glenza in New York
Tuesday 19 September 2017 15.38 BST

Children who start playing American football before the age of 12 are twice as likely to develop emotional and cognitive difficulties compared with those who start later, a Boston University School of Medicine study found.

The effects appeared regardless of whether players were professional or amateur, the number of years they had played, and their levels of educational attainment.

“It really looks as if the developing brain is uniquely vulnerable to the consequences of traumatic injury inflicted by football,” said Barry Kosofsky, director of the pediatric concussion clinic at Weill Cornell Medicine and New York-Presbyterian hospital, who was not involved in the study.

The research comes at the start of the National Football League season, and on the heels of Boston University research that found the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in all but one of 111 NFL players’ brains donated to science. The study is set to be published in the open journal Translational Psychiatry.

-snip-