Excessive use of electronic gadgets triggers early ageing along with blindness

By IANS

NEW DELHI: Excessive use of electronic gadgets, including mobile phones and tablets, can cause "tech neck" that leads to early signs of ageing, health experts have warned.

According to experts, "tech neck", which leads to sagging skin, dropping jowls, and creases above the clavicle, seriously affects facial looks of the person by causing frown lines, undereye bags, and horizontal lines on the neck along with fat prominences.

"People who bend down constantly for long hours while using any handheld electronic device, like smartphones, tablet or computers, are more likely to get wrinkles. The bending position while texting on mobile phones can cause neck, back and shoulder pain, apart from headache, numbness, tingling in the upper limb and pain in hands, arm, elbows and wrists," said Vinod Vij, Cosmetic Surgeon, at Mumbai-based Fortis Hospital.

A recent report by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) had revealed that the number of mobile internet users in the country was expected to reach 371 million by June 2016. As much as 40 per cent of the users consist of youngsters between the age group of 19-30.

Experts have said that the frequent forward flexion causes changes in the cervical spine, curve, supporting ligaments, tendons and musculature, as well as the bony segments, commonly causing postural change.

Mohan Thomas, Senior Cosmetic Surgeon, Cosmetic Surgery Institute, said: "As people do not realise the negativity they are causing to their neck bone and the skin, tech obsessed people should take necessary steps to avoid the overuse of the electronic gadgets."

He said the overuse of smart phones causes shortening of the neck muscles. 

"Apart from shortening of the neck muscle it also increases the gravitational pull on the skin. Ultimately, this results in sagging skin, double chin, marionette lines (vertical lines from lips to chin) and loose jowls (drooping jawline). All these signs have been collectively labelled medically as "smartphone face," he said.

Smartphone gazing in the dark can make you 'Blind'

In a warning to those who sleep with their devices next to them, researchers have found two women who were affected by transient smartphone "blindness" - a condition where they went blind in one eye after gazing at smartphones in the dark.

The first patient - a 22-year-old woman in England - had a habit of gazing at her smartphone before falling asleep.

"She would lie on her left side and look at the screen primarily with her right eye. Her left eye was often covered by the pillow," www.npr.org reported on Thursday.

The other patient in her 40s had similar problems when she woke up before sunrise and checked the news on her smartphone before sitting up.

It had been going on for about a year, ever since she had injured her cornea. Around the same time, she bought a smartphone, the report added.

"They were looking at their smartphones and they just happened to have one eye covered because they were lying in bed," Omar Mahroo, ophthalmologist at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London and an author reported in a paper published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

"In both cases, nothing bad was going on," Mahroo said, adding that it is just that one retina was adapted to light and the other to dark.

"The retina is pretty amazing because it can adapt to lots of different light levels, probably better than any camera," he noted.

Retinas constantly adjust when someone leaves a room and enters a slightly dimmer room or goes inside after being outdoors.

But these two women experienced a rare scenario in which that change would actually be noticeable.

To get to the root of the problem, the researchers asked the two patients to view the smartphone with just the left eye and then just the right eye on separate occasions.

They realised that the eye going temporarily "blind" was always the one that was being used to look at the bright screen.

To confirm this further, Mahroo went in a dark room and with one eye covered, looked at a smartphone for 20 minutes before turning off the screen.

"It did actually feel quite strange," he said. "It would be very alarming if you didn't know what was going on."

After flashes of dim light, the retina that had been exposed to the screen took longer to adjust to new light settings.

According to Mahroo, several other patients have said they experienced concerning vision loss because of smartphone use.

"We don't know of any ill effects" as of now but it can be jarring, the authors noted.