Rugby players face 15x higher MND risk, study urges dramatic rule changes

A landmark study from the University of Glasgow has placed rugby among the sports most urgently implicated in long-term neurological harm, finding that former players face a fifteenfold greater risk of motor neurone disease than the general population. Examining 412 Scottish international players across both amateur and professional eras, researchers believe the steady rise in head injury exposure since rugby's professionalization in 1995 lies at the heart of these findings. The work arrives not as a verdict against the sport itself, but as a reckoning with how it is organized, trained for, an