Leading concussion campaigner Peter Jess says now is the time to focus on prevention and mitigation in collision-based sports rather than whether or not repeated blows to the head will cause neurological impairment.
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Jess' latest comments follow a groundbreaking study in the UK, which revealed alarming results relating to the lifelong health outcomes in former professional soccer players.
The study was led by the University of Glasgow and compared the causes of death of 7,676 former Scottish male professional players - born between 1900 and 1976 - against those of more than 23,000 matched individuals from the general population.
It found that former professional soccer players had an approximately three-and-a-half times higher rate of death due to neurodegenerative disease than expected.
The issue of head injuries in sport has been a worrying one at a local level in Ballarat, with a number of footballers speaking out about their own battles in recent times. Rokewood-Corindhap's Jono Willey had his life turned upside down after a bad on-field concussion earlier this year, Ballarat football great Alan "Dizzy" Lynch opened up about his health issues following a career littered with blows and former North Ballarat Rebels player Liam Picken retired from AFL in April because of head knocks.
"The time now is to focus on rapid point of care diagnostics and mitigation strategies rather than on whether confirmation that neurological impairment will be an outcome," Jess told The Courier.
"This we now know is an incontrovertible medical and scientific fact.
"We need to make the game safe and protect the current and future cohorts of participants suffering the same catastrophic outcomes as the past player cohort. Not to do so is a breach of the peak bodies' duty of care."
Jess said his comments were directed at the peak bodies in all sports, including the AFL.
He said there was a concern that the numbers would "increase exponentially" with women now playing collision-based sports under the same rules as men.
Consultant neuropathologist Dr Willie Stewart told the University of Glasgow website that the study was the largest to date looking in this detail at the incidence of neurodegenerative disease in any sport.
"A strength of our study design is that we could look in detail at rates of different neurodegenerative disease subtypes. This analysis revealed that risk ranged from a 5-fold increase in Alzheimer's disease, through an approximately 4-fold increase in motor neurone disease, to a 2-fold Parkinson's disease in former professional footballers compared to population controls," he said.
The study found that while former professional soccer players had a higher risk of death from neurodegenerative disease, they were actually less likely to die from other common diseases like heart disease and some cancers.
The findings noted that deaths in former professional players were lower than expected up to 70 years old and higher above that age.
"An important aspect of this work has been the ability to look across a range of health outcomes in former professional footballers. This allows us to build a more complete picture of health in this population," Dr Stewart said.
Findings from the study were made public on Monday.
