HONG KONG: A Chinese woman developed blood clots on her brain after spending 20 straight hours looking at her phone screen during a train trip, according to local media reports, told NST.
The 47-year-old woman, a migrant worker, took a train from her hometown in central China’s Henan province to the southern city of Guangzhou at end of the Lunar New Year holiday, video news site Kankan News reported on Tuesday.
Like many others, she used her phone to kill time during the trip.
The train was packed, which made it hard for her to move, and she maintained largely the same posture for over 20 hours, lying on her right-hand side throughout the journey.
The woman fainted when she got off the train and was sent to hospital, where a CAT scan found several blood clots had formed on her brain.
Doctors immediately performed a three-hour operation to remove the clots to prevent further blockages to the arteries in the brain – which would have been life-threatening.
“We took out many blood clots, almost two centimetres in total, which is twice what patients usually have,” Meng Heng, a neurologist at the First Affiliated Hospital of Jinan University in Guangzhou, told the video site.
“We think she kept the same posture for too long, which compressed the blood vessels on the right side of her neck.”
The woman, whose name was not given, had been in good health and was not suffering from any cardiovascular diseases before the incident.
Meng warned that doctors were seeing increasing numbers of younger patients suffering from blood clots.
He advised smartphone users to make sure they adopt a comfortable posture, make sure they keep moving and take long screen breaks.
Last October, a 21-year-old gaming addict in southern China was reported to have lost the sight in one eye after she suffered a retinal artery occlusion after spending the whole day playing the popular game Honour of Kings on her smartphone.
In the latest incident, the woman was pictured recovering in hospital – passing the time by looking at her phone.
