Wiiitis: Can you get hurt playing Wii games?

wii

The Wii may be on your Christmas wish list, but did you know you could contract Wiiitis?

Wiiitis is a sport injury contracted by playing too much Nintendo Wii. Injuries can include tennis-elbow to even shoulder pain. Spending too much time playing simulated sports with video games may lead to sore muscles.

A doctor in Spain diagnosed the new variant of Nintendinitis in a healthy 29-year-old male medical resident who woke up one morning with intense pain in the right shoulder. He hadn’t participated in any sports or physical exercise recently, but he had just purchased a Nintendo Wii video game system and had spent several hours playing the tennis video game.

“If a player gets too engrossed, he may ‘play tennis’ for many hours,” writes Julio Bonis, MD, of the Instituto Municipal de Investigation Medica in Barcelona, Spain to The New England Journal of Medicine. “With the growing use of this new video game system, the risk of the Wiiitis variant may be higher than that of Nintendinitis reported in the literature, especially among adults,” writes Bonis. “Physicians should be aware that there may be multiple, possibly puzzling presentations of Wiiitis.”

 

JOURNAL SOURCE

N Engl J Med 2007; 356:2431-2432June 7, 2007DOI: 10.1056/NEJMc070670

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