Football and MND - have we been here before?

What research has been published?

Research into whether there is a link between football and MND has been conducted in Italy and the USA to find the answers to two main questions. Firstly, are professional football players more at risk of developing MND compared to people who are not footballers? And secondly, if there is a link between MND and football, then what is it about football that increases the risk of developing MND?

Is there an increased risk of developing MND to footballers?

Prof. Adriano Chio, who is an eminent researcher, has been studying potential risk factors of MND to try and find the causes of MND. His published research papers found that Italians playing professional football have a five times increased risk of developing MND than those that did not.

Our comment on Chio's research is that it does"appear to show an increased risk of Italian footballers developing MND, but we still don't know what causes this link, or whether it would be reflected in other groups of footballers and sportspeople".

Other researchers have also reported that football players have a higher risk of developing MND, but the exact figures proposed in these papers vary significantly.

Thus, further studies are still needed in order to confirm whether there is an increased risk of developing MND to footballer players.

If footballers are at a greater risk of developing MND, what is it about football?

The initial research reports suggested four factors that may contribute to the risk of footballers developing MND. These were football related injuries and traumas (such as heading a ball and tackling); exposure to toxic chemicals used on football fields such as pesticides;“cocktails” of performance enhancing and sports injury-related drugs; and perhaps more obviously, high levels of physical exercise.

Therefore, research is being pursued in these four areas to try and better understand why football players as opposed to other sports players may be at a higher risk of developing MND.

Has there been any research published in the UK?

A study performed by King's College London described three amateur football players from the same league who developed MND simultaneously.

The researchers could not conclude that football was a risk factor in this study as the footballers had too many other lifestyle and environmental factors in common.

Talking about the study, joint author Dr Ammar Al-Chalabi said "We think the football angle is important because of a recent study in Italian Series A and B players that suggested an increased risk in professional footballers, but as friends growing up in the same part of England, they shared many other possible risk factors".

Am I at risk of developing MND if I play football?

For the sporadic form of MND we do not know what causes the disease. Researchers have suggested that the risk of developing MND is likely to involve a combination of a wide variety of genetic and environmental risk factors, perhaps occurring years, before the onset of symptoms. Each of these factors is the equivalent of adding grains of sand to one side of an old fashioned pair of scales. It may take dozens of individual grains of sand to tip the balance towards developing MND. The high levels of physical exercise or the drug cocktails mentioned in these studies are equivalent to grains of sand – they may contribute to the risk of developing MND but they are not the single cause.

The Association’s Research Strategy (91 kb) is based on understanding the causes of MND in order to develop more effective treatments. The Association's Director of Research Development, Dr Brian Dickie, comments in the press release “We are working closely with researchers such as Dr Al-Chalabi in trying to unpick the various genetic and environmental factors that predispose people to this devastating disease.”