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Prolonged Gaming Blamed For Rickets Rise
superapecommando writes "Too many hours spent playing videogames indoors is contributing to a rise in rickets, according to a new study by doctors. Professor Simon Pearce and Dr Tim Cheetham of Newcastle University have written a paper in the British Medical Journal which warns of the rickets uptake – a disease which sufferers get when deficient in Vitamin D. The study boils down to the fact that as more people play videogames indoors they don't get enough sunlight and this has meant the hospitals are now having to combat a disease that was last in the papers around the time Queen Victoria was on the throne." At least the kids are eating enough snacks with iodized salt that we don't have to worry about goiters.
Rickets is a softening of bones in children potentially leading to fractures and deformity. Rickets is among the most frequent childhood diseases in many developing countries. The predominant cause is a vitamin D deficiency, but lack of adequate calcium in the diet may also lead to rickets (cases of severe diarrhea and vomiting may be the cause of the deficiency). Although it can occur in adults, the majority of cases occur in children suffering from severe malnutrition, usually resulting from famine or starvation during the early stages of childhood.
If you spend so much time inside playing video games that you get a case of the rickets, you've got way more problems than just vitamin deficiency.
Wouldn't drinking milk resolved the Vitamin D deficiency. I do not know much about the Richet illness but what does sunlight have to do with Calcium.
Our wikipedia overlords report that the suggested daily supplementation for individuals at risk of deficiency is only 25 micrograms. Unless the risks of overdose are particularly hairy, or are encountered at a dose particularly close to the suggested one, this seems like a problem that could be fairly easily solved by slight modifications to the food supply.
Or, heck, just make console controllers whose plastics slowly leach vitamin D into the greasy, sweaty, hands of the gamer kiddies....
I'm going to take this with a large grain of salt here. Does the publication in the British Medical Journal actually blame the rise on gaming, or is TFA simply adding the gaming aspect to it to generate a sensational article to post on a tech site with a large demographic who plays games. TFA only has a link to the BMJ homepage.
Oh, and obligatory: correlation does not imply causation
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Bullshit.
More likely the result of fear-tactic news scaring people into keeping their kids indoors 24 hours a day except for school. Playgrounds are where perverts lurk, remember? Gotta keep little Billy safe!
Of course, indoors there are videogames - but there's also books, and television. Gaming is just one possible indoor activity - if you don't let your kids outside, don't be surprised if they end up fucked up.
Play your video games outdoors.
This has nothing to do with the media telling everyone that we shouldn't even risk a glimpse at the sunlight without a generous slathering with SPF 2 billion sunscreen and a hat.
Thats the thing though, Milk is great for Vitamin D - and Chocolate Milk is a favourite amongst gamers.
However, just having the D in your system doesn't get it to work, something in the sunlight "activates" it. I heard it from a girl one time.
You actually TALKED to a girl? Wow. That's just incredible
War is one of the most horrible things a human can be exposed to. And one of the worlds largest industries.
Sunlight is photons. Energy. Vitamin D is matter. Vitamin D can't literally be in the sunlight.
7-dehydrocholesterol, a derivative of cholesterol, is photolyzed in the skin (mostly in the epidermal stratum basale and stratum spinosum) by ultraviolet light between 270-300 nm wavelength in 6-electron conrotatory electrocyclic reaction. The product is pre-vitamin D3.
Pre-vitamin D3 then spontaneously isomerizes to Vitamin D3 (cholecalciferol) in a antarafacial hydride [1,7] Sigmatropic shift. At room temperature the transformation of previtamin-D3 to vitamin D3 takes about 12 days to complete.
Unless the Wikipedia article is wrong, I think you're misinterpreting the flowchart.
Ingestion of natural vitamin D3 (cholecalciferol) from oily fish, egg yolks, and other vertebrate tissue sources, ingestion of natural vitamin D2 (ergocalciferol) from invertebrate (usually fungal) tissue sources like mushrooms, ingestion of enriched foods with versions of either vitamin, or skin exposure to ultraviolet (which creates D3) all put vitamin D into the bloodstream. Then, the liver performs the first step of processing the vitamin, hydroxylation of either into calcidiol. Then, the kidney performs a second and final hydroxylation, conversion into calcitriol. This is the vitamin used by the tissues.
In other words, sunlight is not involved with either hydroxylation reaction, only in one of the two sources (ingestion or skin synthesis) of the initial forms of vitamin D.
If sunlight were involved in either hydroxylation reaction, we'd need to expose our livers and kidneys to sunlight, and that sounds quite painful and messy to me.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
A Trip to the doctor recently found that my blood work was great, except for a SERIOUS vitamin D shortage. Now I have to take 2000Mg of Vitamin D a day. Considering my free time consists of "World of Warcraft" this isn't too surprising. But I'm 45 years old. When I was a kid I had an actual life and a decent diet. If my vitamin D levels had been this low at 12, my bones would have been like soft cheese. How hard is it to force some vitamins into your kid? We were raised by a single parent, and somehow she still managed to make us take a multi-vitamin. I can't get over the fact that there are people who would never dream of missing an oil change on their car who can't see to it that their kid gets a vitamin supplement every day.