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A study out of England has found a different kind of event hiding inside that same collision \u2013 one that registers in the frontal brain before the head has moved at all.<\/p>\n
A signal that standard sensors miss<\/p>\n
Researchers at Loughborough University<\/a>\u2018s Sports Technology Institute set out to look past the usual numbers. <\/p>\n Most studies of soccer headers rely on sensors mounted outside the skull or on crash-test dummies.<\/p>\n Those tools track how fast the head whips and how the neck absorbs the jolt. They often miss what happens inside the brain itself.<\/p>\n Dr. Ieuan Phillips, the study\u2019s lead author, and Professor Andy Harland, who has worked on football impacts for 20 years, ran a different setup.<\/p>\n They built a surrogate head \u2013 a skull shell with brain-mimicking gel inside \u2013 and slid a hydrophone into the cavity. <\/p>\n That sensor doesn\u2019t track motion but rather listens intently for pressure waves in the brain.<\/p>\n Pressure signals before movement<\/p>\n What it caught was a sharp burst of pressure traveling through the gel toward the front of the brain, with each ball strike. It peaked within microseconds of contact.<\/p>\n On the trace, it shows as a clean spike. It reveals no noise, and no slow rumble of the head<\/a> moving. <\/p>\n It\u2019s just a fast wave radiating from the impact spot, caught at 10 million readings per second.<\/p>\n A pressure pulse with lightning speed<\/p>\n This is where the team found something unexpected. <\/p>\n The wave arrives before the head has even begun to move \u2013 before acceleration kicks in and before brain strain. It was faster than any standard measurement.<\/p>\n Until this study, no one had measured the pressure pulse directly inside a model of a soccer header. Acceleration sensors weren\u2019t built for that signal.<\/p>\n Separate brain-injury research has linked rapid pressure spikes inside the skull. It is the kind seen during blast exposure in soldiers, causing cellular and vascular damage.<\/p>\n A paper<\/a> using lab-grown brain organoids found that pressure waves alone can disrupt brain cell activity. <\/p>\n The Loughborough work can\u2019t confirm the same effects, but it has now measured similar pressure energy reaching the front of the brain.<\/p>\n Pressure waves from different balls<\/p>\n The team rounded up 20 soccer balls representing key designs from the last century.<\/p>\n They consisted of old leather panels stitched with cotton, modern thermo-bonded synthetics, and a range in between the two.<\/p>\n The researchers launched each ball at the head model at match-realistic speeds, dry and wet, at different temperatures. Heading conditions vary on a Saturday pitch, and the lab matched that.<\/p>\n Across the 20 balls, the pressure wave varied wildly. The biggest differences ran up to 55 times \u2013 one ball sent a small pulse forward, while another sent a much larger one at the same speed.<\/p>\n If certain ball constructions transfer less energy through this route, ball design becomes a lever engineers can pull. <\/p>\n The \u201cwhy\u201d is harder. Ball weight, surface stiffness, and the way the ball deforms on impact are all different variables.<\/p>\n Earlier work from the same lab found leather balls carry different mass when wet than synthetic ones. The new study does not pin down which ball property drives the pressure spike.<\/p>\n Limitations of the research<\/p>\n The researchers are careful in print and in interviews, because the setup is a model. No volunteer headed any ball, and no one tracked memory or mood before and after.<\/p>\n Whether this pulse, repeated thousands of times across a career, contributes to the higher rates of dementia in former pros remains to be seen.<\/p>\n That risk is real. A landmark Glasgow study<\/a> of more than 7,000 former Scottish professionals found they died from neurodegenerative disease at roughly three and a half times the rate of matched controls.<\/p>\n New measurements enter the debate<\/p>\n Harland, who has spent 20 years studying football impacts, said this allows the team to give a much more detailed description of how energy transfers during heading.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is still much work to do before we fully understand what this means for brain health,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n \u201cThese findings provide opportunities to work towards ball designs and testing specifications that minimize energy transfer into the brain<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n The team has shared the work with FIFA and UEFA through the Football Association, which funded the study.<\/p>\n A new target for ball design<\/p>\n The picture of a header just got more detailed. Until this work, the field had two clean measurements \u2013 head acceleration and brain strain.<\/p>\n There is now a third \u2013 a measurable pressure wave that hits the front of the brain microseconds before the head has finished moving. <\/p>\n A Swedish analysis<\/a> of top-flight players found higher rates of dementia in outfield players who head the ball, and no excess in goalkeepers who rarely do. <\/p>\n Ball certification can now include a pressure-wave threshold alongside size and weight. <\/p>\n Manufacturers have a target, and leagues have a lever. The argument over whether ball design plays into brain health has its first hard number.<\/p>\n The study is published in Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers: Journal of Sports Engineering and Technology<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n Like what you read?\u00a0Subscribe to our newsletter\u00a0<\/a>for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates.<\/p>\n Check us out on\u00a0EarthSnap\u00a0<\/a>, a free app brought to you by\u00a0Eric Ralls\u00a0<\/a>and Earth.com.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Scientists studying the brain risk from soccer headers have often focused on speed and force. The faster the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":662134,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[440],"tags":[49,48,561,82],"class_list":["post-662133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-soccer","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-soccer","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/662133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=662133"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/662133\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/662134"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=662133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=662133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=662133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}