well professor willie stewart, is a honorary professor at the glasgow university school of psychologyfound no evidence that common risk factors — such as smoking, alcohol and obesity — are responsible for the elevated dementia risk observed among former professional footballers. hejoins me now... this is a long—running study that we have been working there in glasgow, looking at lifelong health and outcomes for former professional footballers. the original paper we demonstrated five years ago that former professional footballers have this higher risk of dementia and we have shown that it seems to track two longer careers in positions where there is more heading and more head impacts, such as defenders, but there is still a question as to whether anything else might be contributing to this for the other risk factors like high blood pressure, excess alcohol consumption, whether these were contributed into dementia risk, and that is what we have looked at now, we have looked at these other risk factors and try to see whether these were responsible in any way for the high dementia risk we

the research was led by glasgow university's dr willie stewart.& manchester united defender gary pallister told the bbc of his health fears after years of heading footballs. ijust remember going i just remember going and ijust remember going and being picked up on a sunday morning and got in the car, i started getting a tingling sensation down my arm, trying to shake it off driving to the game, so my vision started to 90, the game, so my vision started to go, it started blaring it was like that in my vision. started to get a headache and had only been travelling five minutes, i said i'm not feeling well. i was having a panic attack i'm thinking that's a lot of tingling down my arm, is a heart attack, stroke his mac at that age i'm thinking it can't be, so i didn't really know what it was until i got home. i said to my mum, you know, i didn't know what a migraine was at the time. that was the beginning of it. throughout the rest of my career so they were quite debilitating. my vision, my speech, the tingling, the violent headaches. it would be like