21-year-old woman loses her eyesight after staring at her smartphone game for days

A woman from China has gone partially blind, after spending an entire day playing a game on her smartphone.

The 21-year-old, who goes under the pseudonym Wu Xiaojing, was a hardcore fan of popular multiplayer smartphone game Honour of Kings.

Wu, who works in finance, was said to have been playing the game for several hours when she suddenly lost her sight in her right eye.

She was taken to several hospitals and was diagnosed with Retinal Artery Occlusion (RAO) in her right eye.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

RAO is usually more common in elderly patients, and can result in permanent loss of vision.

Users on Chinese social media site Weibo were mostly unsympathetic to Wu's plight.

"She's still holding a cell phone in bed [in that picture]" said one user.

"This is terrible but I still haven't uninstalled [the game]," another said.

Severe addiction

Wu admitted to regularly playing the game for up to eight hours without eating, drinking or going to the toilet.

"If I don't work, I usually get up around 6am, have breakfast, then play until 4pm," she told Chinese state media outlet The Global Times.

"I would eat something, take a nap, wake up and continue playing until 1 or 2am. My parents had warned me that I might go blind."

According to Wu, she had spent the whole of Oct. 1, a public holiday, playing the game. It was only after dinner that she lost her sight and was brought to the hospital.

She was diagnosed the following day with RAO -- which occurs when there is a blockage in one of the arteries that carry blood to the retina.

According to a specialist from the Nancheng hospital where Wu was diagnosed, it was "likely that she had suffered from RAO after playing "excessively" on her phone.

However, Dr David Allamby, medical director of an eye clinic in London, told news outlet the Daily Mail that there was a "slim" chance that Wu developed RAO from playing on her mobile.

"You don't get RAO from video-related severe eye strain as is suggested here -- it's most commonly evidence of some form of cardiovascular disease," he said.

"The only potential link -- and it's slim -- is that sometimes migraines can be a rare cause of RAO."

Honour of Kings is one of China's most popular smartphone games, and has some 200 million users.

The company behind the game, Tencent, had previously had to restrict kids under the age of 12 to just one hour of game time per day, in order to prevent addiction.