Lung Collapses Are a Surprisingly Common Esports Injury | Hacker News Reader

Lung Collapses Are a Surprisingly Common Esports Injury

compete.kotaku.com

20 pointspizza10 comments

"common among tall skinny men" - 1 or 2 per cent of the population have EDS, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and 95% are never diagnosed. Marfans habitus (tall skinny etc) is typical but not uniform in EDS. Lung collapses appear to be more frequent in EDS, and Esports are more attractive than physical sports for those with EDS because EDS makes sports injuries very frequent. Fatigue, an allergy-like condition, dysautonomia(dizzyness for example), anxiety and flexibility (when young) are common symptoms.

https://edsalert.wordpress.com/2009/03/24/abnormalities-of-t...

https://rd.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02938195?no-access...

Are they common? The examples are largely given without context including the general rate of this condition in similar populations. Is this cherrypicked data, or real? Who knows...

Edit: If I missed the relevant information, could someone please point me to it?

Edit: I don’t mind downvotes, but I’m curious about what’s drawing them.

Not sure why you are getting down-voted. The article doesn't refer to any data that could give an insight into how common Lung collapses are.

> I reached out to three medical professionals in hopes of finding out whether there was, however improbable it might sound, a connection between esports and collapsed lungs.

and

> Without hard data, though, Bunney was hesitant to draw a correlation

It looks like the author just spoke to 3 med professionals, 1 of who is quoted as saying there is no hard data.

Oddly, as the article noted in a single line, they're common among tall, skinny men. I've had three lung collapses so far, but all do to Birt-Hogg-Dube [1]. When I was being checked out in the hospital each time, the nurses/hospital staff all said, "ah, yea, tall and skinny".

In reality, you can live through a lung collapse and do nothing. The doctor will take an x-ray, make sure the pocket of air outside the lung is shrinking and send you home. If it's fully collapsed, you'll get some surgery to repair it and a tube to make sure nothing gets back in. It never seemed as life-threatening as the article suggests. It wasn't fun, but I also never felt like I was near death or anything.

It feels like the author just found spontaneous pneumothoraxes to be interesting, and built an article around it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birt%E2%80%93Hogg%E2%80%93Dub%...

"Indoor air pollution, the degradation of indoor air quality by harmful chemicals and other materials, can be up to 10 times worse than outdoor air pollution."

There's no data in this article to support the basic headline.

All they had to do was include a single sentence about the rate of lung collapse in the US (or perhaps the rate of lung collapse for men, since most pro gamers are male) compared with the rate of lung collapse for professional gamers.

But then again, this is a Gawker offshoot we're talking about, so we can't expect much.

Wikipedia says that the rate of primary (not associated with lung disease) spontaneous lung collapse among males in the general population is 7.4 per 100k per year.

The article says there were at least 6 cases in the last 7 years among high profile players. Anyone know how many players are "high profile"? If it is less than about 11.5k, then the rate among them would be higher than that of the general population.

To count as "surprisingly common" the rate would have to be quite a bit higher than that of the general population. Maybe 5x? So then the question is are there less than about 2.3k "high profile" players?

It would have been nice if the article would have done that analysis instead of letting the readers look up statistics.

This looks like a case of the base rate fallacy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy

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