Sparring, Not Bouts, Hurts Boxers Most

It’s not the bouts that damage boxers’ brains--it’s the practices, a study says.

The abilities to concentrate and remember were lower among those who did more sparring, the report said. The number of competitive fights didn’t make a difference.

The article in The Physician and Sportsmedicine journal looked at 42 professional fighters averaging about 25 years of age, who had been fighting an average of 9 1/2 years.

The men reported the number of bouts they fought, the number of sparring sessions per week and rounds per session and their subjective estimates of the intensity of their sparring. The men also were given brain scans; 17 had borderline brain atrophy readings and 2 were clearly abnormal.

The fighters averaged close to 56 bouts as amateurs and 10 after they turned pro. They had sparred, on average, almost four days a week, six rounds per session. On a 1-to-4 scale of intensity, the average was 3--”almost as hard as competition,” said Dr. Barry D. Jordan of New York City, lead author of the study that appeared in the May issue.

Scores on tests of memory and concentration fell as the number of rounds sparred per week rose above the average of almost 23, the study found. The number of bouts didn’t affect test scores, it said.

The likely reason is that boxers spar a lot more than they compete--and they spar hard, said Jordan, a former medical director for the New York State Athletic Commission. “Most of the trauma boxers sustain is probably during training,” he said. “Boxers may box up to 50 rounds a week in preparation for a fight.”

Overall, the losses affected the men’s ability to organize information, pay attention to it and store it in their minds in a way that they could remember it, the study said. The results also fit a pattern associated with the brain damage that was found in brain scans, the report said. The pattern is not uncommon among boxers, it said.

The researchers did not use the data to determine the boxers’ possible loss of function by comparing them to the tests’ norms, however. The boxers come from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds and the tests might score them low simply because of their background, Jordan said.