A new study done on a small sample of college football players found that the memory centers in their brains were smaller than average. For players that had suffered concussions, the areas were even smaller.

According to the Daily Herald, the research done on the NCAA players in the study, which was released Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, is just preliminary. More research needs to be conducted to determine whether or not the player will have more issues later on in life.

The research revealed a link between the college football players and the autopsies of some former NFL players whose hippocampus had been affected by a destructive disease that was caused by head blows.

When compared to other college athletes who are involved in non-contact sports, the football players performed just as well on mental function tests that included memory. However, the football players that had played the longest had slower reaction times.

In the study, the researchers looked at the players' hippocampus, a small region found behind the front part of the brain. Researchers found that the right part of the hippocampus was 26 percent smaller on average in the football players who had concussions than the other athletes.

The hippocampus in players who had not suffered concussions were 17 percent smaller while similar differences were found in the left part as well.

Researchers studied the differences between 25 Division 1 football players and 25 college athletes in non-contact sports.

Patrick Bellgowan, the study's co-author and neuroscientist at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research in Tulsa, Oklahoma, told the Herald it's possible that the players could have been born with the smaller memory area as the researchers could not determine when an incident could have occurred.

Bellgowan said that the study's results are "a flag that concussions need to be taken seriously" because head trauma is believed to affect shrinking in the brain's region.