FA to trial removal of heading at all age groups under 12.

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The authors of a new report suggest that radical changes could be made to rugby and football, including eliminating tackling from rugby before the age of 14 and banning heading outside the penalty box in football.

The chief executive of the CLF, Dr Chris Nowinski, said that the analysis provided “the highest scientific confidence” of a causal link between repeated head impacts and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the neurodegenerative condition that can only be diagnosed after death. The authors of the paper want changes to “how games are played to reduce or eliminate” head impacts.

“The next easiest thing to do is change how you practise,” Nowinski said. “There’s already a discussion about how many headers a week, but if that’s 20 a week, over a year that’s more than 1,000 head impacts. Once you deal with age of exposure and practice, then we can have a discussion about the rules of the game. For example, in soccer, do we need to head the ball outside the box? I’d say no. These rules were not handed down from God.”

In the paper, published in the Frontiers in Neurology journal, the researchers asserted “they have the highest confidence in the conclusion that RHI [repetitive head impacts] causes CTE”. Dr Adam Finkel, a co-author of the study and a University of Michigan professor, said: “This shows it is time to include repetitive head impacts and CTE among child protection efforts like exposure to lead, mercury, smoking and sunburns.

“The discovery of the link between smoking and environmentally caused lung cancer is analogous to the accruing body of evidence linking RHI to CTE. Both links were controversial, specifically because the extreme latency between exposure and symptomatic disease.

“Knowledge gaps [in smoking research] have not limited the ability to assert a causal link between smoking and lung cancer, and similarly should not limit the ability to determine the likelihood of a causal link between RHI and CTE.”