Following the death of Nobby Stiles and Sir Bobby Charlton’s diagnosis of dementia, the spotlight is once again on
Football and its links with the condition
The science is in its infancy, but, yes, a link was officially asserted when Jeff Astle was ruled to have died by “industrial disease”, caused by repeated blows to the head. Astle died in 2002 at the age of 59, but in 2014 an autopsy on his brain uncovered the presence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the neurodegenerative disease once known as dementia pugilistica. Last year, a study compared thousands of footballers in
Scotland with the wider population and found that a former player was three-and-a-half times likelier to develop a neurodegenerative disease than the norm, even allowing for the fact they tended to live longer too. For Alzheimer’s the figure was five-fold.