Caution: PlayStation Lumps Are Newest Gaming Hazard

playstation lumps

Be careful with that PlayStation.

Swiss researchers now say that keeping too tight a grip on your PlayStation controller and repeatedly pushing the buttons can cause a newly identified skin disorder. The condition is identified by painful lumps on the palms.

Officially called “PlayStation palmar hidradentitis”, the skin disorder causes painful lesions.

“The tight and continuous grasping of the hand-grips together with repeated pushing of the buttons produce minor but continuous trauma to the (palm) surfaces,” Vincent Piguet and colleagues at University Hospitals and Medical School of Geneva reported in the British Journal of Dermatology.

A spokesman for Sony Corp was quick to belittle the crackpot diagnosis, noting that the study involved one person and said that Sony has sold millions of the consoles since they first debuted 13 years ago.

“As with any leisure pursuit there are possible consequences of not following common sense, health advice and guidelines, as can be found within our instruction manuals,” Sony spokesman David Wilson said.

“We would not wish to belittle this research and we will study the findings with interest, but this is the first time we have ever heard of a complaint of this nature.”

We’re still looking for the chapter that says “don’t grip the controller too tightly for long periods of time”. We must have overlooked it.

The case involved a 12-year-old girl who went to a hospital in Geneva with painful lesions on her hands, which had been present for about four weeks. I guess that fourth week really convinced her to get to a hospital. She had no other lesions anywhere else on her body.

The doctors soon learned that several days prior to the outbreak of her palm lesions, the girl had begun playing a game on her PlayStation for many hours each day.