THE old leather footballs which were used in the professional game right up until in the 1980s have, mercifully, long since been replaced by far lighter and safer synthetic versions.

So it is to be hoped the instances of former players suffering from dementia – of whom Celtic legend Billy McNeill is, it was confirmed yesterday to the horror and disbelief of everyone in the Scottish game, the latest – will become far less commonplace in years to come.

That is not, however, to say that the sport should become complacent about what is an alarming issue. Plastic balls can still cause cerebral damage. More research on the link between heading and cognitive impairment in later life is still required.

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Just this month, a new study by researchers from the University College London and the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery concluded that the practice, and even years of colliding with other players, was damaging footballers’ brains.

Post-mortems on 14 former players who had developed dementia long after their careers in the sport were over found that six had Alzheimer’s disease while four also showed evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).

“Our findings suggest that there is a potential link between repetitive sub-concussive head impacts from playing football and the development of CTE,” said Helen Ling, a co-author of the study. “If we can demonstrate that the risk is higher than the normal population that we will know we really need to urgently look at who is at risk and put protective strategy in place.”

Many players of McNeill’s generation, most notably Jeff Astle of West Bromwich Albion and Frank Kopel of Dundee United, have suffered from degenerative brain disease in their later years.

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Given that the weight of the balls they used would increase substantially when they got wet it is little surprise. After Astle’s death in 2002 a coroner compared his persistent heading of the ball during his playing days to him being subjected to repeated cerebral blows.

Astle’s daughter Dawn, who has campaigned for greater awareness of the damage caused by heading of the ball, has appealed for more footballers to donate their brains to medicine when they die. “It’s happened in the US with American footballers and it’s vitally important that we get a similar thing here,” she said.

Jimmy McGrory, Celtic’s all-time greatest goalscorer with a British record 485 goals to his name, was another who was struck down by dementia before he passed away aged 78 in 1982. It is no coincidence that one of the greatest strengths in the striker’s armoury was his heading.

It is not just the older generation who are at risk. Calls to ban schoolchildren from heading the ball have been dismissed by some as excessive. But is that really the case? In the United States, where 50,000 concussions were recorded among school football players in 2010 alone, they have already taken this step as the result of a lawsuit.

The Professional Footballers’ Association in England appealed for a ban on under-10s heading the ball last year while the Scottish Youth Football Association has also vowed to review its guidelines.

Those moves followed a study by the University of Stirling which found there was serious memory impairment after heading a ball. Dr Willie Stewart, a brain injuries specialist at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow, collaborated on the research.

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“It stunned me that just a single session of practice, nothing untoward, nothing out of the ordinary, could produce that immediate change,” said Dr Stewart.

“If I put boxing gloves on my hands, went into a school and offered to bang the kids around the head with the same force as a football, I would be locked up. If I take a football in and did the same thing, I would be appointed coach.

“Boxing has decided to protect the kids’ brains from head impacts up to a certain age and introduce it gradually. There is no science behind it, it is based on what seems to be common sense.”

Billy McNeill’s family, who have bravely decided to make the European Cup-winning captain’s condition public in an attempt to raise awareness of the problem in the hope that more research is carried out and greater care is given to others who are suffering, certainly believe there is a link to his years of heading heavy footballs.

Former players have far lower levels of heart attacks and strokes than the general population. It has not been proven either that playing football increases the risk of suffering from dementia. It is unclear if individuals would have developed the mental illness anyway due to genetic or lifestyle factors.

But nothing can be taken for granted. The potential dangers, including to the current generation, of heading the ball should be examined to a far greater degree than in the past. There is every chance this is a serious problem for the game.