FOOTBALLERS who head the ball frequently are more likely to suffer balance problems, warn the authors of a new study.

It shows that headers may be “undermining” players’ balance, adding weight to growing concern about the health effects of headers.

Concerns have grown about the long-term impact of heading the ball since the death of England and West Bromwich Albion player Jeff Astle in 2002.

The cause of his death was a degenerative brain disease that had first become apparent as long as five years earlier.

A coroner found that the repeated minor trauma of heading the ball had been the cause of his death, as the leather footballs used in Astle’s playing days were considerably heavier than the plastic ones used nowadays, particularly when wet.

For the study at the University of Delaware in the United States, 20 players recruited from the community in Newark, New Jersey, took a balance test where they walked along a foam walkway with their eyes closed under two conditions – with galvanic vestibular stimulation (GVS) and without GVS.

For GVS, electrodes placed behind each ear stimulate the nerves that send messages from the balance system in the inner ear to the brain, so the stimulators can make you feel like you are moving when you are not. In this case, it made participants feel like they were falling sideways.

The footballers, who had an average age of 22, also completed questionnaires about how many times they had headed the ball during the past year. The number of headers over a year for each participant ranged from 16 to 2,100, with an average of 451 headers.

The study found that the players with the largest number of headers had the largest balance responses to GVS in both foot placement and hip movement during the walking test, which indicated they had balance recovery problems.

Study author Dr Fernando Santos, of the University of Delaware, said: “Soccer players must have good balance to play the game well, yet our research suggests headers may be undermining balance, which is key to all movement, and yet another problem now linked to headers.

“It is important that additional research be done to look more closely at this possible link with balance and to confirm our findings in larger groups of people.”