Still not convinced that playing football might not be in the best interests of collegiate athletes in the long term? Well, the University of Cincinnati just released the findings of yet another disturbing study that will change the way you view concussions sustained by football players. The study found that many college football players can suffer from neuropathic brain changes well after suffering concussions and moving on with their lives.

The findings of the Cincinnati study are based on MRI scans done on roughly a dozen former college football players who showed "evidence of significantly lower cortical thickness within portions of both the frontal and temporal cortex of the brain, versus a similar group of track and field athletes." A decreased cortical thickness typically correlates with the previous presence of concussions in the brain. Cal Adler, the vice chair for clinical research in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience at the Cincinnati College of Medicine, was one of the researchers involved in the study, and he spoke more about the findings this week.

"We found evidence of persistent cortical thinning in some former collegiate football players several years after the end of their active playing career," Adler said. "The former football players showed, on average, lower cortical thickness across prefrontal and temporal brain regions—areas of the brain involved in sustained attention, memory, and executive abilities—cognitive domains critical to long-term professional and social function."

Adler added that the effects of most concussions heal within several months, but he said that it's no longer uncommon for young athletes to show signs of physical changes to their brain as a result of head trauma. "We have seen where elite athletes from a variety of contact sports can exhibit evidence of neuropathic changes as early as young adulthood," he said.

The authors of the study stressed that they conducted an exploratory study and that additional research needs to be done to find more conclusive results about the effects of concussions. But he said that the study points to there being consequences for college athletes that will continue to potentially manifest for years after they're done playing.