Campaigners hope Cambridge forum raises 'crucial awareness' into sports brain injuries
The public event is taking place today
The widow of a former footballer who died from a brain condition has said a conference in Cambridge today is crucial to raising awareness around brain health.
Judith Gates lost her husband Bill, who played 333 times for Middlesbrough between 1961 and 1974, after he was diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a disease linked to repeated head injuries.
The International Neurotrauma Society conference at the Cambridge Corn Exchange aims to discuss the links between sports head injury and concussion, as well as how to recognise and treat it.
Judith was at a football match in the city on Sunday played in memory of Bill, who helped inspire a campaign to highlight the links between football and dementia.
Conference is 'absolutely crucial'
"It's absolutely crucial for awareness raising, for sharing points of view, for giving credibility to the science that's emerging and I don't think we can underestimate the importance of that," she said.
"Making change is one conversation at a time, one statement at a time, one person at a time who suddenly has an 'a-ha' moment and says 'I get it, this is potentially dangerous'."
Judith is the chair of the Head Safe Football charity, which aims to safeguard young players from CTE by reducing heading in training.
She's due to be at the conference, led by Professor Willie Stewart, neuropathologist at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow and a brain injury researcher.
Dawn Astle, daughter of West Bromwich Albion and England centre-forward Jeff Astle, the first British professional footballer to be diagnosed with CTE, is due to speak at the forum.
Tina White's the widow of her late husband Godfrey 'Goff' White, known to be the first amateur footballer diagnosed post-mortem with CTE, a type of dementia linked to repeated head impacts.
"The brain is still developing even at 13 and I think that's when they stop the controls in training," she said.
"We don't want to spoil football, but there's got to be controls and more research on amateurs."
Horse riding most popular with brain injury cases - research
A study led by the University of Stirling alongside the University of Glasgow found 46% of all patients with sport-related injuries that took part in the analysis had not fully recovered after six months.
The study analysed data for 4,360 patients from 18 European countries who attended hospital with a traumatic brain injury (TBI) and had a brain scan.
Researchers also found horse riding accounted for 22% of TBI sports-related cases studied, with football accounting for 13% of these cases.
Professor Stewart, one of the researchers, hopes today's conference will be a learning curve for some.
"We're trying to get that message through to people engaged in sport and today's an open session for people who are maybe engaged with the football to find out what's happening in sport to try and mitigate risks," Professor Stewart said.
"We have a panel speaking, talking about personal experiences of head injuries in sport, living with someone that's got dementia associated with sport, and then we've got some of the sports themselves talking about their approach to it."