Football, or soccer, is played and loved across the world. Part of its charm is the fact that no one can use their hands to touch the ball, instead, different parts of the body, like the feet, knees, and the head are used. Using a person's feet and knees is all fine and dandy, however, using the head is different issue.

According to researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University and Montefiore Medical Center, the university hospital and academic medical center for Einstein, repeated heading a soccer ball increases the risk for brain injury and cognitive impairment.

In the study, lead author Michael Lipton, MD, PhD, associate director of Einstein's Gruss Magnetic Resonance Research Center and medical director of MRI services at Montefiore, along with colleagues used diffusion tensor imaging, an advanced MRI-based imaging technique, on 38 amateur soccer players that had an average age of 30 years, who had all played the sport since childhood.

The participants were then asked to recall the number of times they have headed a ball during the past year and were ranked according to their frequency. Brain images of those who were frequent headers showed that they suffered from mild traumatic brain injury, a brain injury similar to those with concussions.

After determining the damage heading can deal to the players, they sought to identify a threshold level for heading frequency. Based on their analysis, they discovered the threshold level of approximately 1,000 to 1,500 heads a year, with anything surpassing those numbers can lead to significant injury.

Dr. Lipton pointed out that though this number may not be that big for non-players, regular soccer or football players go through a thousand headings in only a few days. The doctor added that even though heading a soccer ball will not lacerate nerve fibers in the brain, repetitive heading may lead to degeneration of brain cells.

Other studies also elaborate on the dangers of heading a ball. According to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, 33 young adult amateur soccer players in the Netherlands were observed to see how heading can affect them, reported FamilyEducation.com.

Results show that 39% of the soccer players had an impaired performance on tests that measured planning abilities compared to 13% of the control athletes. When it comes to memory tests, 27% of the soccer players had impaired performance compared with the 7% of the control athletes.

But heading is a crucial and common part of football. With its unavoidability, the best thing that players can do is to perform the technique properly, because when the technique is done poorly there is a higher risk of head or neck injuries.

Here is a video on how to perform the heading technique properly by ExpertVillage.com