LONDON, July 12 : Retired British professional soccer players showed structural brain differences and high rates of anxiety and depression but no signs of cognitive decline in a study looking to establish if repetitive impacts like heading the ball affect the risk of developing dementia. The study, by researchers at Imperial College London, included 142 former players aged between 30 and 60 and compared them to 56 similarly aged healthy people with no history of contact sports, military service, or past concussions. In addition to using questionnaires and tests to measure cognition, researchers analyzed structural MRI brain scans from a qualifying subset of 124 players and 40 people in the control group to check for regional differences in grey matter volume. The authors, who presented the