Health Highlights: Feb. 24, 2009
Feb. 25 -- Here are some of the latest health and medical news developments, compiled by editors of HealthDay:
Video Game Overuse Causes Skin Disorder
Skin specialists have identified a new skin disorder linked to overuse of video game consoles. The condition -- PlayStation palmar hidradenitis -- is described in a case study by doctors at Geneva University Hospital in Switzerland.
They treated a 12-year-old girl who had intensely painful sores on her hands. She couldn't recall any recent trauma to her hands and hadn't done any sports or physical exercise recently, BBC News reported.
However, her parents said she had recently started to play a video game on a PlayStation console for several hours a day, and continued playing even after she developed the sores on her hands.
The doctors cited a combination of factors: tight and continuous grasping of the console's hand grips, repeated pushing of the buttons, and sweating caused by game-related tension, BBC News reported.
The girl made a full recovery after 10 days of not using the game console. The study appears in the British Journal of Dermatology.
-----
Huge Increase in U.K. Diabetes Rate
From 1997 to 2003, there was a 74 percent rise in the number of new cases of diabetes in the U.K., an alarming increase linked to growing obesity rates, say researchers who analyzed data from nearly five million medical records.
By 2005, more than 4 percent of the U.K. population had diabetes, nearly double the rate of a decade earlier, BBC News reported.
Of the more than 42,000 people newly diagnosed with diabetes between 1996 and 2005, more than 41,000 had later-onset type 2 diabetes, which is associated with unhealthy lifestyle habits.
The findings suggest that diabetes rates in the U.K. are rising faster than in the United States, which has one of the highest rates of diabetes in the world, BBC News reported.
The study appears in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
-----
Popular Reads
ABC News Live