Kids playing football had their brains affected after playing just one season, suggested a new study published online in the journal Radiology.
While past studies involving youth sports looked at changes in the brain as the result of a concussion, the new study sought to see the impact on the brains of youths ages 8 to 13 who had less severe head impacts, according to a statement from the Radiology Society of North America Monday.
"Most investigators believe that concussions are bad for the brain, but what about the hundreds of head impacts during a season of football that don't lead to a clinically diagnosed concussion," Dr. Christopher T. Whitlow, associate professor and chief of neuroradiology at Wake Forest School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, N.C., said in the statement.
"We wanted to see if cumulative sub-concussive head impacts have any effects on the developing brain," added Whitlow, the study's lead author.
The study looked at 25 male youth football players using head impact data that was recorded using what is called the Head Impact Telemetry System, the statement noted. The system has been used to examine high school and collegiate football for severity of helmet impacts in other studies.
"This is important, particularly for children, because their brains are undergoing such rapid change, particularly in the age category from maybe 9 to 18," Whitlow told NBC News. "And we just don't know a lot of about it.
"We have detected some changes in the white matter. And the importance of those changes is that the more exposure you have to head impacts, the more change you have," he added.
Whitlow told NBC News said the study's results generated questions that he felt were also important to answer.
"Do these changes persist over time or do they just simply go away? Do you get more changes with more seasons of play? And most importantly, do these changes result in any kind of long-term change in function like memory or attention or anything that would be important in your ability to function day to day?" Whitlow said, according to NBC News.
Dr. Christopher Giza, professor of pediatric neurology and neurosurgery at the University of California, Los Angeles, told the website HealthDay that while the study was too small to be conclusive, its results were consistent with previous studies and added new data to the research.
"A big strength of this study is (the researchers) have this very quantitative measure that can essentially count the magnitude, the size and the number of impacts," Giza told HealthDay. "That's certainly more objective than relying on an athlete or coach to tell you that somebody has symptoms.
"There is some evidence that cumulative impacts, regardless of whether you had a concussion or not, might be a problem. Being able to measure those impacts more objectively can be helpful," Giza added.