Should boxing be banned due to brain injury risk?

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. (CLAUDIA DAUT)

LONDON (Reuters) - When Ireland's Katie Taylor was taking hits and striking blows for boxing's 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 shouldn't 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 London's Institute of Neurology. "To me as a neuroscientist it's almost surreal."

Hardy, whose research work focuses on Alzheimer's 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 Alzheimer's.

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

"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 America's National Football League (NFL) players.

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Should boxing be banned due to brain injury risk?