boxing brain damage
concussion

Martial Arts Linked to Brain Damage

I’ve written a lot about how athletes can avoid injury. So far, I’ve said nothing about those sports where harm is the goal.

Today a new study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine looks at boxing and mixed martial arts and comes to an unsurprising conclusion: The more you fight, the more you hurt your brain.

But the details matter. The researchers found that boxers fare worse than mixed martial arts participants. And they are hoping their work can give fighters some idea of how much combat causes how much damage.

Smaller Brains, Slower Thinking

Researchers from the Cleveland Clinic compared 224 professional fighters to 22 people with no history of head trauma. They matched the two groups for age and educational attainment.  Of the fighters, 131 did mixed martial arts and 93 boxed.

The participants ranged in age from 18 to 44 years. Just over half had gone to college.

They had fought for an average of four years, with 10 professional matches per year. Some were complete rookies. Others were veterans of up to 101 matches.

The researchers used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to measure the size of the subjects’ brains at the start of the study. They repeated the scans every four years after that.

They tested the subjects’ verbal memory, processing speed, fine motor skills and reaction times.

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“The fighters’ brains lost an estimated 0.19 percent in processing speed per fight.”

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And they calculated a “fight exposure score,” which combines the duration and intensity of a fighting career.

They found that the more the fighters fought, the smaller their brains.

Smaller brains and more fighting were associated with slower thinking. In fact, the fighters’ brains lost an estimated 0.19 percent in processing speed per fight.

Boxing Worse than MMA

It’s not the first time researchers have looked at the question of brain damage in martial arts.

Reporting in the American Journal of Sports Medicine last year, researchers from the University of Toronto found that referees ended 12.7 percent of mixed martial arts matches because of knockouts. A knockout is where the referee finds the fighter unconscious or totally disoriented.
Another 19.1 of matches ended in technical knockouts. That’s where the referee finds a fighter too dazed to mount a defense.
Both types of knockout could be considered concussions, the researchers said. They proposed that mixed martial arts fights stop for an assessment when someone gets knocked down. And they suggested training referees to recognize patterns of hits that might cause more damage.The authors of today’s study found that boxers had both smaller brains and slower processing speeds than mixed martial arts fighters.

The researchers speculated that boxers get hit in the head more often because mixed martial arts fighters can also use other ways of subduing their opponents, such as grappling.

They suggested using some of their measures, such as the Fight Exposure Score, to figure out when fighters should have a brain check. Or just stop fighting.


The featured photo on this page is “Head Blow” by andriuXphoto.