Texting long messages can be a pain in the neck. The repetitive action of working your fingers across the keyboard of your cell phone can cause some of the same chronic   pain problems previously limited to those who'd spent a lifetime typing. The possible connection is particularly worrying considering how much teens and young adults -- and increasingly those in professional settings -- are texting nowadays, said Judith Gold, who carried out one of the first studies on the potential connection. Text messaging is a fairly new technology, Gold says, so this is a new area of research for those who study ergonomics  . But "considering the similarities in body position, findings from research on overuse injuries from computers could be applicable" to texting. "The way the body is positioned for texting - fixed shoulders and back with rapidly moving fingers - is similar to the position for typing on a computer," Gold explained. Previous research has found pain in the elbow connected with too much thumb texting.  To look for a broader link between texting and chronic pain, Gold and her colleagues sent a questionnaire to 138 college students, asking them to report the number of text messages they sent per day (in four categories: 0, 1-10, 11-20, 21+ messages) and to point out any discomfort they felt on a body map. The research showed an association between the number of text messages sent per day and shoulder discomfort. The effect seemed to be particularly pronounced in males, though Gold says she doesn't know why that would be. "What we've seen so far is very similar to what we see with office workers who've spent most of their time at a computer," Gold said. However, Gold's study did not take account of the amount of time the people surveyed also spent typing on computers, which could be affecting the results. In which column in the newspaper can you find the passage?
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