Rugby chiefs must take urgent motion to scale back head injuries after a study indicated that former international players are 15 times more more likely to develop motor neurone disease, researchers said Tuesday.

Academics, who studied a cohort of former Scottish internationals, found that, overall, the ex-players were about 2.5 times more more likely to develop neurodegenerative disease than expected, in comparison with members of the final population.

Multiple studies have shown a link between brain injuries and an increased risk of developing neurodegenerative disease, and that ex-professional athletes are at an increased risk of developing such conditions.

As concerns grow, a gaggle of former players has decided to sue various governing bodies for allegedly failing to guard them from everlasting injury.

In the newest research, a team led by the University of Glasgow compared health outcomes amongst 412 male, Scottish, former international rugby players with over 1,200 matched individuals from the final population.

The outcomes, published within the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, showed that while age at death was barely higher amongst former players, they were also at higher risk of a neurodegenerative disease diagnosis in comparison with their matched controls.

The danger varies by sub-type, but not by player position. In addition to the upper risk of developing motor neurone disease, the danger of Parkinson’s disease is thrice greater.

“This study provides further insight into the association between contact sports and neurodegenerative disease risk,” said Glasgow consultant neuropathologist Willie Stewart, who led the research team.

“Of particular concern are the info on motor neurone disease risk amongst our rugby players, which is even higher than that for former skilled footballers. This finding requires immediate research attention.”

The Motor Neurone Disease Association says the disease affects as much as 5,000 adults within the UK at anybody time, with a 1 in 300 risk of getting MND across a lifetime.

The researchers said the paper’s findings echo those of previous studies of former skilled football players and American football players but indicate many of the rugby players studied were amateurs, playing before the game turned skilled in 1995.

They said this showed the risks weren’t confined to skilled athletes.

Stewart, whose previous research showed ex-professional footballers had a significantly higher risk of dying from neurodegenerative disease than the final population, said he was concerned that rugby players faced much more risks within the skilled era with an increasing variety of matches being played.

“Rugby has talked rather a lot and is doing rather a lot about head injury management and talking about whether it may possibly reduce impact exposure in the course of the week,” he said.

“I feel those conversations have gone on some time and the pace of progress is pretty slow.”

He added: “As an alternative of talking about extending seasons and introducing latest competitions and global seasons they ought to be talking about restricting it as much as possible, cutting back on the quantity of rugby we’re seeing and eliminating as much training as possible.”

Stewart said rapid strides had been made in American football, highlighting the reduction involved training.

“I feel rugby might be speeding up this pace of change,” he said. “I realize it’s tough to think about about there being less rugby quite than more but perhaps less is more.

“Possibly you get a better-quality product if the players are less damaged and fitter quite than depending purely on quantity.

“So I feel rugby has to give it some thought. You’ll be able to’t proceed to place young men and ladies through what they have been through now we all know from the amateur era there’s this risk of brain disease.”

Motor Neurone Disease Association director of research development Brian Dickie welcomed the report but said research needed to be prolonged into much larger populations.

“We all know that the overwhelming majority of cases of MND involve a fancy mixture of genetic and environmental risk aspects, so the extent of genetic risk could also be different in high performance athletes compared with the final population,” he said.