What age should your child start football?

An interesting and frightening paper about youth football.

We have seen in prior studies, the longer someone plays football, the greater their risk of CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy).

A recent study looks at another factor, age the the player started playing football.

It appears in this relatively small study of 211 autopsied brains with 84 that started football before age 12, researchers found that playing football before age 12 leads to much earlier and much greater problems with mental health, behavior, and mood problems… as well as Alzheimer’s and other serious neurological diseases.

Researchers found that those who played tackle football before age 12 had an earlier onset of cognitive, behavior and mood symptoms by an average of 13 years, compared to those who started after age 12.

Among the players without CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) in the study, those who played football before age 12 had an earlier onset of cognitive symptoms by an average of 20 years, and behavior and mood symptoms by 22 years.

Of those players, many had other neuropathological diagnoses such as Alzheimers, Lewy body pathology, frontotemporal lobar degeneration and axonal injury.

The researchers commented that it appeared before the age of 12, their developing brains were not able to deal with head impacts and concussions.

This strongly calls into question the common practice of kids playing Little League Football and starting the kids out at such an early age.

Certainly there’s enough evidence to be very cautious.

References:
1. Time article https://time.com/5258406/cte-youth-tackle-football/

2. Actual study: Age of first exposure to tackle football and chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Annals of Neurology 2018. Michael L. Alosco PhD, et al       
   
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ana.25245