New diagnosis: 'text thumb'

New Zealand student Fleur de Vere Beavis, 20, who sends up to 100 text messages a day on her mobile phone, has been diagnosed with the country's first known case of texting tenosynovitis, otherwise known as text-messager's thumb, a newspaper reported Sunday.

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Constant text messaging has inflamed the tendons along the thumb and side of the wrist and filled the surrounding tissue with fluid, the Sunday Star-Times said, quoting a report in the New Zealand Medical Journal.

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It said only two other cases of the ailment had been reported in a school-aged child in Singapore and a 13-year-old girl in Australia, but the authors of the journal report, Emma Storr and Mark Stringer, said tenosynovitis was likely to be more common than thought, given the popularity of texting.

New Zealand with a population of 4.2 million people has about 4.5 million mobile phones in use and more than 28 million text messages are sent every day.

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