Deniz Ince loves playing football and baseball video games on his Wii video game console, and says he would swing, pitch and throw with the controller for up to two hours a day when he didn’t have school.

But he soon noticed an unwelcome side effect – wrist pain. And one day, the 11-year-old, who lives in St. Louis, Mo., noticed that his thumb was starting to hurt.

He asked his father, who is a rheumatologist, if he was going to get arthritis or tendinitis from playing video games. His dad replied that he didn’t know…

 John Sperling MD, MBA, an orthopedic surgeon at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., says the findings are interesting. “I think the big difference between the video games and sports is that for most sports, people are involved in training and practice but with many games like Wii, there’s no specific training or any degree of fitness required to do them,” he says.

Arthritis Today by Jennifer Davis, 10/17/09

Tags: Orthopedics, Orthopedics, wrist pain