Footballers are 50% more likely to develop dementia than the rest of the population, a study has found, fuelling calls to restrict rules around heading the ball in football.
Researchers from the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, published in the Lancet Public Health journal today, compared the health records of 6,000 elite footballers and more than 56,000 non-footballers between 1924 and 2019.
They found that among male footballers playing in the Swedish top division, 9% were diagnosed with neurodegenerative disease, compared with 6% of the control sample.
The study examined differences in…
