College football players have visible brain changes | Reuters

“Maybe this is just the precursor of it.”

The researchers write in JAMA that they didn’t find any differences in behavior between players and non-players, but Bellgowan told Reuters Health that a smaller hippocampus is linked to depression, schizophrenia and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).

“Maybe there is something going on early on,” he said. “How did they get there? I think this study points out the early stages of that.”

Players who had been diagnosed with concussions and those who had been playing for years had smaller hippocampuses – a brain structure critical to memory – compared to those who never played football or played for fewer years, researchers found.

Bazarian was not involved with the new research, but has studied the brains of young athletes at the University of Rochester Medical Center in Rochester, New York.. Those who had been diagnosed with concussions also had smaller hippocampuses than the players without past concussions.

“Boys hear about the long-term effect on guys when they’re retired from football, but this shows that 20-year-olds might be having some kind of effect,” said Patrick Bellgowan, the study’s senior author from the Laureate Institute for Brain Research in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The longer the young men had played football, the smaller their hippocampuses were and the slower their reaction time on one of the tests.

SOURCE: bit.ly/WddS8K JAMA, online May 13, 2014.

“The conservative approach is what I’m hoping to get out there,” he said.

Both Bellgowan and Bazarian said it will take longer studies to find out whether a smaller hippocampus may cause problems for these athletes in the future.

Bellgowan is also on the faculty at the University of Tulsa, where, he said, “Participation of the athletic department was essential to this work.”

For now, Bellgowan suggested that parents and coaches take a conservative approach when dealing with student athletes by taking them to specialists when they walk off the field with a headache.

The participants had magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of their brains and researchers used the images to measure the volume of certain brain regions. There has been growing concern over whether the connection between contact sports – like football – and CTE, which is a brain disease known to affect some athletes who experience repeated hits to the head, may extend to younger players.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – The brains of college football players may already display the effects of years of taking hits, according to a new brain imaging study.

“We keep hearing about retired football players having diseases that relate back to smaller hippocampuses,” Bellgowan said. The athletes also took a computerized test to assess their cognitive abilities.

“People try to understand why some NFL players have what looks like Alzheimer’s in their forties,” Dr. “None of these players were feeling bad but their brain structure isn’t normal.”

Between June 2011 and August 2013 the researchers recruited 25 college football players who had been diagnosed with a concussion, 25 players without a history of diagnosed concussion and 25 similar young men who had never played.

The symptoms of CTE, which tend to set in years after the last traumas, often include memory loss, aggression and dementia.

The researchers found that college athletes had hippocampuses between 17 percent and 26 percent smaller than non-athletes. Jeffrey Bazarian said