Fabrice Muamba of Bolton Wanderers lies prone on the pitch during the FA Cup match at Tottenham on Saturday.

• English FA Cup match abandoned after Bolton player collapses on the pitch
• Fabrice Muamba is taken to hospital as paramedics try to revive the 23-year-old
• Referee calls off quarterfinal match after consulting Bolton and Tottenham players

(CNN) — An English soccer match between top-flight teams Bolton and Tottenham was abandoned on Saturday after a player collapsed on the pitch before halftime.

Bolton midfielder Fabrice Muamba was taken to hospital, the Premier League club confirmed, after medics came onto the field to try to revive him.

The 23-year-old from Zaire, who has represented England at under-21 level, fell to the floor in the 41st minute with no other players near him.

Referee Howard Webb consulted both teams before calling off the match in London, which was a quarterfinal tie in England’s prestigious knockout competition, the FA Cup.

More to follow…

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What occurs inside the skull of a soccer player who repeatedly heads a soccer ball? That question motivated a provocative new study of the brains of knowledgeable players that has prompted discussion and debate in the soccer community, and some anxiety among those of us with soccer-playing offspring.

For the study, researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York recruited 34 adults, males and ladies. All of the volunteers had played soccer given that childhood and now competed year-round in adult soccer leagues. Every filled out a detailed questionnaire developed particularly for this study to determine how many times they had headed a soccer ball in the prior year, as properly as no matter whether they had knowledgeable any identified concussions in the past.

Then the players completed computerized tests of their memory and other cognitive abilities and had their brains scanned, utilizing a sophisticated new M.R.I. approach identified as diffusion tensor imaging, which can uncover structural changes in the brain that would not be visible throughout most scans.

The researchers discovered, according to information they presented at a Radiological Society of North America meeting last month, that the players who had headed the ball a lot more than about 1,100 occasions in the previous 12 months showed significant loss of white matter in parts of their brains involved with memory, attention and the processing of visual info, compared with players who had headed the ball fewer times. (White matter is the brain’s communication wiring, the axons and other structures that relay messages among neurons.)

This pattern of white matter loss is “similar to those noticed in traumatic brain injury,” like following a significant concussion, the researchers reported, even although only one of these players reported getting ever knowledgeable a concussion.

The players who had headed the ball about 1,100 occasions or more in the past year had been also substantially worse at recalling lists of words read to them, forgetting or fumbling the words far more often than players who had headed the ball less frequently.

“Based on these results, it does appear like there is a possible for substantial effects on the brain from frequent heading,” says Dr. Michael L. Lipton, associate director of the Gruss Magnetic Resonance Analysis Center at Einstein and senior author of the study.

For decades, there have been intimations that heading could have undesirable consequences, which includes reports in the late 1980s and early ’90s of memory deficits in retired, specialist Scandinavian soccer players. But those studies depended on players’ slippery recall of the number of times they had headed during their entire careers and didn’t take into account alcohol use or a history of severe concussions, and the findings usually have been dismissed as unreliable.

Then last year, Elizabeth Larson, a researcher at Humboldt State University in California, cautiously tracked the heading history and cognitive wellness of 51 male and female soccer players at the school, a Division II plan, more than the course of a full collegiate season. She identified that the players who headed the ball most often in the course of the season, regardless of whether in practices or games, performed drastically worse on tests of visual memory, which includes the ability to recall shapes and images, than they had at the start of the season. Those players also reported more headaches and episodes of dizziness than other players.

“Physiologically, it makes sense” that verbal and visual recall may be affected by frequent heading, stated Ms. Larson, who now coordinates the North Coast Concussion Program at the university. Those memories are partially processed in the front and rear of the brain, “the places that bump against the skull when you head the ball,” she says.

In confirmation, the new imaging study showed that the frontal lobe, just behind the forehead, and the temporo-occipital region, at the bottom-rear of the brain, were the locations displaying the most damage among the high-frequency headers.

So what’s a soccer parent to do?

“What our study shows is that there appears to be a threshold” – about 1,100 or so balls headed in a single year, a substantial number — “beyond which heading may be problematic,” Dr. Lipton says. “Below that threshold, it appears that heading is safe. So our investigation is truly optimistic, I feel.”

Many questions, however, stay — particularly about the impact of heading in young players, which has not to date been studied. “On the 1 hand, kids’ brains are creating rapidly, so they may knowledge far more problems” than adults, Dr. Lipton says. “On the other hand, their brains are renowned for their plasticity, so perhaps they’ll recover far better. We just don’t know.”

The practical significance of any brain harm is also uncertain. None of the players who scored poorly on cognitive tests in the Einstein or Humboldt State studies had noticed any memory difficulties. “The effects, such as they are, appear to be subtle,” Ms. Larson says.

Still, she recommends some preemptive actions, based on the existing science. “There is a growing consensus that children younger than 12 shouldn’t be heading,” she says, and parents must monitor the number of heading repetitions and any accompanying symptoms in older young children. Ask your child if he or she experiences headaches or dizziness following practice and, if so, “check with the coach about decreasing the frequency of heading drills.

“No one is suggesting that heading should be outlawed,” she concludes. But science and typical sense both indicate that “it’s almost certainly not a very good idea to practice heading over and more than and more than.”

NYT &gt Health