Perhaps when you were younger, your parents told you that you couldn't play football because you could likely get a concussion. This is a rational fear of such physical sports, given how frequently football athletes are diagnosed with concussions. A statistic by the Boston University Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) revealed that they had diagnosed 345 retired football players with CTE, which arises from repeated head injuries like concussion that are left untreated. So what about the thousands of athletes, including children and adolescents, who play football? What are the benefits of playing such a physical sport, if any? This blog explores both the pros and cons of playing football by discussing two research studies that highlight how cognitive inhibition and inhibitory control, two closely related concepts, are affected by football and football-related injuries.
To begin, cognitive inhibition is a component of inhibitory control that refers to the brain’s ability to block out irrelevant information and allocate its resources to more important and relevant stimuli. In the study, “Dynamic cognitive inhibition in the context of frustration: Increasing racial representation of adolescent athletes using mobile community-engaged EEG methods,” Dr. Caitlin M. Hudac et. al. used EEG to examine how frustration-inducing tasks can affect cognitive inhibition within black adolescent athletes. Likewise, the researchers discuss how concussion-related injuries are seen in higher frequency in black adolescent athletes due to systemic healthcare inequality. Within the sample, 17.4% of the athletes were diagnosed with a concussion. In the experiment, participants engaged in a response inhibition task, where the researchers induced frustration by changing rules and aspects of the game midway through the experiment. To assess the results of the EEG, the researchers focused on the N2 ERP component. The N2 ERP component shows a higher amplitude (very negative) in response to cognitive inhibition efforts. Thus, the researchers predicted that the N2 would decrease in negative amplitude due to reduced cognitive inhibition from affective interference. The study's results found that during the pre-season, the participants showed a decrease in cognitive inhibition during frustration (decreased N2 amplitude). Contrarily, post-season data showed that cognitive inhibition was habituated during the baseline and frustration, proving consistent with other research showing that brain injury results in a reduction in N2 amplitudes.
Contrarily, while Hudac et. al (2022) show how football-related concussion injuries can lead to reduced cognitive inhibition, the study, “Acute high-intensity football games can improve children's inhibitory control and neurophysiological measures of attention,” by Lind et al. (2019), shows how engaging in football can improve inhibitory control. Inhibitory control is the brain’s ability to suppress impulsive and automatic urges, to engage in more goal-related behavior. Cognitive inhibition, as assessed by Hudac et. al (2022), is considered to be a facet of inhibitory control. In this study, the researchers administered declarative memory tests to a sample of four fifth-grade classes. After the declarative memory test, the students were then given an acute intervention, in which they had 20 minutes of physical activity in the “small-side real football (SRF)” group or the “small-sided walking football (SWF)” group. Both groups had students engage in football, but the SWF group had a lower level of cardiovascular exercise intensity. After the intervention, the students completed a test measuring inhibitory control, in which they were presented with an Eriksen flanker task. They were presented with a group of arrows all pointing in the same direction, and then asked to indicate the direction of the arrows (congruence trial). Then, they were presented with an incongruence trial, in which all but one arrow pointed in the same direction. The incongruence trial measured how well the participants could ignore distractor information, and thus engage in inhibitory control. The results of the study found that the participants performed better in the tests of inhibitory control when they engaged in SRF interventions. Likewise, supplemental EEG recording found that students in the SRF group demonstrated higher P300 amplitudes, which reflects a greater engagement in task-dependent attention.
Overall, while Hudac et. al (2022) highlights the negative effects that football-related injuries can produce on cognitive inhibition, Lind et al. (2019) highlight the positive effects that engaging in football can have on inhibitory control. Although cognitive inhibition is a facet of inhibitory control, and both studies show conflicting results, it appears that football itself is not the enemy. Rather, the lack of adequate safety precautions and post-injury care, as Hudac et. al (2022) mentions, seems to be contributing to the detrimental effects seen in the emotional dysregulation of football players post-concussion. Likewise, while the study by Lind et al. (2019) uses high-intensity cardiovascular exercises in the SRF group, the fifth-grade students only engaged in these activities for 20 minutes total and likely did not sustain any head-related injuries. Thus, the findings of both of these studies suggest that football can be positive for cognitive development, and it is the associated injuries due to systemic issues related to healthcare inequality or lack of proper safety equipment that are producing these negative consequences.
References
Hudac, C. M., Wallace, J. S., Ward, V. R., Friedman, N. R., Delfin, D., & Newman, S. D. (2022).
Dynamic cognitive inhibition in the context of frustration: Increasing racial representation of adolescent athletes using mobile community-engaged EEG methods. Frontiers in Neurology, 13. https://doi.org/10.3389/fneur.2022.918075
Lind, R. R., Beck, M. M., Wikman, J., Malarski, K., Krustrup, P., Lundbye‐Jensen, J., &
Geertsen, S. S. (2019). Acute high‐intensity football games can improve children’s inhibitory control and neurophysiological measures of attention. Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, 29(10), 1546–1562. https://doi.org/10.1111/sms.13485
McKee, A. (2023, February 6). Researchers Find CTE in 345 of 376 Former NFL Players
Studied | Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine. Www.bumc.bu.edu. https://www.bumc.bu.edu/camed/2023/02/06/researchers-find-cte-in-345-of-376-former-nfl-players-studied/
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