Boxing: Should science on brain injury inspire a ban?

March 21, 2013

Orlando Cruz of Puerto Rico fights Aalan Martinez of Mexico in the fifth round of a sixth-round knockout at the Kissimmee Civic Center in Kissimmee, Florida March 15, 2013. Reuters picLONDON, March 21 When Irelands Katie Taylor was taking hits and striking blows for boxings Olympic debut in an east London ring last year, John Hardy did not want to look.

To this leading neuroscientist and molecular biologist, a boxing bout is little more than a session of mutual brain injury. He was horrified to see women boxing at Olympic level for the first time at the London 2012 Games.

We shouldnt get our fun out of watching people inflict brain damage on each other, said Hardy, who is chair of Molecular Biology of Neurological Disease at University College Londons Institute of Neurology. To me as a neuroscientist its almost surreal.

Hardy, whose research work focuses on Alzheimers and other types of dementia, said having women in an Olympic boxing ring was a terrible thing not because he thinks women should not compete alongside men in sport, but because women boxing simply meant more people inflicting more damage on more brains.

That, in turn, was highly likely to mean more people suffering the devastating, incurable symptoms of brain diseases such as Alzheimers.

Advances in modern neuroscience mean scientists know more than ever about chronic brain damage and the long-term trauma that can result from frequent knocks to the head.

You get tiny lesions along the blood vessels where they have torn the nerve cells around them. This damages those nerve cells, and those cells start to develop the tangles that you see in Alzheimers disease, Hardy said.

And what we now understand is that this process spreads.

Partly due to this new understanding, now is a time of intense sensitivity about and scrutiny of brain damage in sport particularly among North Americas National Football League (NFL) players.

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Boxing: Should science on brain injury inspire a ban?