Dementia in football: Ball research to cut health risks

Phillips said: “It weighs on me, I suppose, that perhaps this research has come a little bit too late for some people. We don’t know what their neurodegeneration outcome will be.

“But it’s that hope for future generations thing that really gives me a lot of heart. And I think it hopefully gives everybody something to focus on and a direction to go with it.”

Phillips extols the virtues of football for both physical and mental health and highlighted that even studies indicating players being at a higher risk of neurodegenerative disease, “the raw numbers are actually quite small, percentage wise”.

He said it was an area of science to keep an eye on, but would not want anyone to panic: “There are things that can be can be done about this pressure wave.”

Phillips said more work now needed to be done, using this research as a foundation, for real-world application.

“What we do is we measure energy in a lab with dummy heads. What effect that has on the brain remains to be seen,” Phillips said.

“But having said that, we know that pressure waves are a well-established cause of brain injury, both short and long term in other contexts.”

Another aspect is the difference between skulls.

In their experiment they used a dummy based on the average MRI data of an adult Japanese man from the university’s partners, Tokyo Institute of Science in Japan.

“One of the big things I’m really interested in is the differences between males and females,” he said.

“One of the big things with the female skull is that it is anatomically slightly different both in thickness and geometry.

“So that might have an effect, but we haven’t studied that yet. I think it is a really key thing to look at.”