The world's most popular sport is reckoning with serious health concerns.

The largest study of its kind has now found that repetitively heading a soccer ball can negatively impact the brain, even in amateur players who don't report concussions.

Among 352 amateur adult soccer players, those who took more than a thousand headers a year showed microscopic changes to the outer wrinkles of their brains, right behind their eyes, regardless of their age or sex.

These players also performed slightly but significantly worse on memory and learning tests.

"What's important about our study is that it shows, really for the first time, that exposure to repeated head impacts causes specific changes in the brain that, in turn, impair cognitive function," explains neuroscientist Michael Lipton at C

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