the damage heals itself or is permanent and exactly how much heading is too much.
“A much larger study would be needed to really define where the threshold is, but in general, the threshold is on the order of a thousand headers per year,” he said.
Dr. Sam Gandy, chair of Alzheimer’s research and director of the Mount Sinai Center for Cognitive Health and NFL Neurological Care in New York City, thinks the evidence is mounting that carriers of the APOE e4 allele are in real danger of developing dementia if they play a lot of contact sports.
“I think that it is time to seriously consider how and where in the system there should be some option for educating parents about the potential risks of the APOE e4 allele, especially when two copies are present,” Gandy explained.
This will be expensive and cumbersome to implement, he said. “But if we are to do all we can to protect the brains of child athletes, it seems to me that children with two copies of APOE e4 should be identified and their parents should undergo informed consent,” Gandy said.
As early as 1997, Gandy and his colleagues identified the APOE e4 allele’s connection with the
