I am tall, so I do bash my head on low ceilings and in cars. I have read that the inner skull has very sharp baffle like protrusions. When the head is struck hard enough the brain can get damaged as it hits the sharp protrusions. Is this true?
I have noticed that when I play soccer heading the ball gives me a headache this concerns me. If you are hit on he head by a powerful sho in soccer, I would think brain damage could occur. But i’m no scientist.
According to this study in Neurology, there does appear to be an issue for soccer players, especially those who head the ball frequently.
That abstract says:
What does that mean? It sounds like they haven’t bothered to control for concussions, to find out whether heading the ball itself actually seems to have a negative effect or not.
As to the OP’s question: no, you’re not going to get brain damage from heading soccer balls or accidentally bumping your heads on things occasionally. You’d have to be really smashing your head for that to become an issue - serious-level boxing, for instance.
Actually, it means what the conclusion of the report stated, in the abstract: "Conclusion: Participation in professional soccer may affect adversely some aspects of cognitive functioning (i.e., memory, planning, and visuoperceptual processing). "
Now, by extension, for a non-professional player, one must consider how often one heads the ball. This particular study was released in 1998, there have been more than a few studies since that support the findings. There was a big stink about brain damage in school students, then the press’ attention drifted away.
As for the OP’s question on banging one’s head around the house, unless you’re putting holes in walls and doors at home, I’d not be concerned about those occasional bangs on the melon. There aren’t any great projections of the skull that would damage the brain anyway.
The damage is literally caused by the brain slamming against the skull, causing bruising and tearing of tissues.
It DOES speak greatly on us as a nation, where we are no concerned about traumatic brain injury because of professional football players and our soldiers injured in the war, but have remained without outrage for soccer players and students playing high school sports!
Well, you say the meaning of the abstract is plain, but the conclusion you seem to have drawn from it there - ie. that how often professional soccer players head the ball has an effect on their cognitive function - doesn’t seem to be the necessary conclusion of that abstract. The abstract’s exact wording is that cognitive functioning was inversely related to how often a player headed the ball and how often they were concussed, and possibly any number of other factors, such as receiving blows to the head from kicks, elbows or head clashes. It sounds like the study’s results could be consistent with a conclusion that heading the ball has no impact on cognitive performance at all. That’s why I’m looking for clarification on what the abstract means, but I can’t access the full article.
I just looked at the full paper. It actually seems pretty sound considering the nature of the exposures and associations the authors were looking for.
Among other things, control and/or correction (among the various study groups and controls) were made for things like level of education, alcohol and drug (ab)use, anesthetic exposure, soccer field position (i.e. midfield players and goalkeepers defined as “non-headers” = players who are unlikely to head the balls versus those who more often ‘head’ the ball such as offensive players), concussions experienced outside of sports, and other factors which might influence psychological testing results. And, by the way, the controls were other elite athletes such as swimmers and track & field participants. I also looked over the statistical approaches employed and they seemed impressive to me (FWIW), e.g. how many articles use the Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons like this one did? The authors even looked for and detected a “dose response”. The whole thing looks pretty good to this, admittedly neuropsychologically naive, reviewer.
I think it’s a nice addition to the literature.
ETA: P.S. ‘Neurology’ is a first class journal and is really the premier one for clinical neurology. Simply by virtue of the fact that the paper appeared there, gives it credibility.
I reviewed the article long before I retired from the military, as it was of special interest to me, due to my MOS.
I’ve noticed degeneration amongst my peers before they ETS’d or retired. I also am noticing some lack of mechanical function over a long period personally.
So, it’s a huge personal issue for me, but I AM rather good at divorcing myself from personally interested issues and medicine, secondary to our special military medical environment that I lived in for decades.
As in, either I’d become so personally involved that I’d flub care of a buddy OR flub care that I personally guided upon myself. Either way, no OTHER care was available and I was QUITE successful over those many years.
But, today, I find signing my name difficult in the extreme, short term memory is REALLY shot, some various other issues, to include an EXTREMELY anal retentive spelling issue is in the midden. Where I was the house dictionary, in spite of 6 dictionaries and three encyclopedias, I was the reference source.
Today, I recall the reference data overall, in specific detail, on some issues. On others, recollection and I have to re-investigate the issue. On some things, absolute blanks.
And I also have had multiple traumatic brain injuries of assorted sorts.
The brain is built with multiple redundancies, BUT, damage IS cumulative. To include the damages of age AND continued degradation from injury.
Which took 6 spell checks now to post, where NONE would have been necessary 20 years ago and I’m a decade old next month.
This part seems to be a separate question from the one that’s been mostly discussed so far. Wizard One did respond, but just to clarify, there aren’t actually any sharp baffles around the brain, right? You have to hit your head hard enough to smack the brain against the skull to get a concussion, right?
Is it possible to get serious brain damage (like diffuse axonal injury or something) without the brain impacting the skull at all?
Besides the documented and studied link between soccer players doing head shots and getting damage*, there’s also the documented and studied link between boxers getting hit on the head and receiving damage. No, not everybody boxer gets Alzheimer or Parkinsons; but a significant majority of those studied were impaired compared to people who hadn’t been hit on the head regularly.
Right. There are no sharp baffles, just a hard skull. The brain itself is wound in many bulges (like the intestine) to get more surface area, but that’s the squishy part.
But that is trifling easy. Or rather, it’s difficult to hit your head/ be hit on your head without any movement or impulse in real life. In the OPs scenario, he’s walking around the house, so he’s moving, when his head is suddenly stopped, and his brain decelerates a bit slower than the skull. It’s in the very nature of two objects with different properties to react to a change of impulse differently.
I’m not a trauma doctor, but in real life, I think it’s rare. Either the person is moving, or the object hitting them is moving. Unless an anvil falls on your head slowly enough to not crack the skull … not, wouldn’t work either probably.
Could you provide a link for this study please? I have whacked my head quite hard against low wooden ceilings in the past. I once stayed in a house with low roofs and doors. I must have bashed my head 10-15 times that day. Could damage occur in these circumstances.
I must say that I am put off playing soccer now. Which is a shame, as I enjoy the sport.
I wasn’t questioning the chops of the researchers. What I was sceptical about, just from the abstract, is whether their results really allowed them to draw any conclusion regarding the effect of heading the ball, specifically, on cognitive function. They found that professional soccer players tended to incur more damage to cognitive functioning compared to non-contact sports, but that could be caused by the physical contact with other players - kicks to the head, catching elbows, having the ball smashed into your face at close range (which does happen fairly frequently, especially for defenders). Does the study try to isolate heading the ball specifically?
Sorry to hear that. What I was wondering though wasn’t whether our brains can incur cumulative damage, which I don’t doubt, but whether heading a soccer ball frequently over a long period of time can cause that type of damage.
I believe it’s the same study to which I linked in the first reply to your original post. (If I’m incorrect, someone should feel free to correct.)
Of course your brain is always moving around inside your skull whenever you accelerate or decelerate your head, but what I meant was, to cause a concussion you have to hit your head hard enough that the brain moves far enough to impact the side of the skull, rather than just moving around inside the CSF surrounding it. Is that correct?
I vaguely recall a thread from a year or so ago where Magiver claimed that striking somebody on opposite sides of the head would cause brain damage from the two intersecting shock waves. This assertion proved … controversial, to say the least.
Oh yes, here is the thread: Could you knock out an enraged chimp?
… And here is Magiver’s post.
Seems relevant to the question of whether there is any way to damage the brain without causing a brain/skull impact (whether of the brain hitting the skull, or the skull hitting the brain, if the impact is violent enough to break the skull).
ETA: Oh, and thanks for verifying the lack of sharp baffles or projections inside the skull. So it seems that part of the OP’s concerns, at least, can be put to rest.
That is a very fair question (and really the key one). The best the authors could do was separate the soccer players into those that would be expected to ‘head’ the ball a lot (offensive types) and those who would rarely, if ever, 'head the ball (i.e. goalkeepers and midfield players). Indeed, the two groups had different degrees of impairment. In addition, they searched for a dose response by relating the number of headers a player made to degree of cognitive impairment (i.e. they were able to add up the number of headers* each player had made and looked for correlations with various metrics of cognitive change).
*it seems that this is an officially recorded statistic similar to ‘shots on goal’ in hockey or sacrifice bunts in baseball.
This book on Forensic Mechanics claims that the skull does have internal ridges that can present sharp projections, and which can potentially lacerate brain tissue. However they’re talking about incidents regarding enormous levels of force - including rotational force - being applied to the skull, such as being hit from the side in a car accident. So you’re still right, the OP is not in any danger of lacerating his brain just by bumping it on a door frame.
If it takes a blow the force of a boxers punch to cause brain damage, how can heading a travelling ball have the same effect?
From what I have read, you constrict the neck muscles when heading the ball, which is supposedly good for brain damage. Although I don’t know why.
Two things:
Yes, the force of a boxer’s punch can cause brain damage. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the force of a soccer header (which is, yes, undoubtedly less) doesn’t cause brain damage. The “boxer’s punch” isn’t necessarily the minimum threshhold for brain damage.
There may be a cumulative effect going on. If every header only causes a tiny bit of damage, but you execute hundreds and hundreds of them, it adds up.
Or face-planting the steering column of a jet-ski… speaking from personal experience. (Ridges on the inside of the… err… *my *skull, and brain-bruising were part of the discussion with the Neuro-psychologist). 
Very interesting. Then I have a couple of follow-up questions:
Are these ridges that only occur at the skull joints, or do they occur elsewhere?
Are these common features in everybody’s skull, or is this something that varies widely and some people just get unlucky and happen to have sharp projections inside their skulls, while others have fairly smooth ridges?