Carpal tunnel syndrome

What is Carpal tunnel syndrome?

This is a name that is thrown around the gaming community at times. My favorite mentioning is on the Southpark episode where they play World of Warcraft non-stop. Kyle gets, what he claims to be, carpal tunnel during a gaming session.

The carpal tunnel syndrome is affecting the wrist. Your hand can feel numb, give you tingling sensations and be painful. It can show itself in different ways. 
One of the things that can cause this is highly repetitive tasks (even if they involve low force motions). Does that not sound like a pro gamer to you?
Or even if you are not a pro gamer but just a regular guy/girl who plays a lot this might be an issue.

The symptoms often occurs at night, so you might not connect the feelings of pain, numbness and tingling to your daily activities.

Besides that, which is the most relevant one in this post, it can be caused by stuff like diabetes, obesity, narrow-diameter carpal tunnel or if you have suffered damage to your wrist that created scarring tissue on the inside.

Normally the fingers that is affected is the thumb, the index finger and the middle finger. It often occurs at night. 
The fact that the symptoms often occurs at night when you basically are just going to sleep is something positive. Since you can use a wrist-aid when sleeping. That allows the wrist to rest and not being bent awkwardly. 

To go deeper on the subject I will add a picture on how the wrist looks like. 

To the right you see the actual tunnel. That Median nerve is trying to share the space with a lot of other things. And it is not hard to imagine that it sometimes becomes too tight. 

If things are not fixed by resting your wrist at night there is surgery to be had to fix the problem. 
It is not usually done until the symptoms are not just occasionally occuring, but constant. When the night-splinting and other such methods are no longer helping enough. 
It is called "carpal tunnel release surgery" and that is basically what it is. They cut the wrist open to remove the pressure on the nerve.

Before doing surgery, there are other treatments besides the splinting methods. And just because you get affected by this and even diagnosed, it is not a sure thing that it will last. It might be hard to continue to play computer games at a really high level without taking a break from it though. 

If it is an inflammation or something causing your problem, it will probably heal if you rest the wrist and maybe get some medicine.

Don't use the information in this post to diagnose yourself with carpal tunnel and start treatment. I would suggest that you go to the doctor to see what can cause your problems. 

To avoid problems there are lots of exercises to do. 

Just by searching google you will find images like this one with examples on movements that might help preventing it. And just by thinking about it, it kind of makes sense. By doing all the same movements for many hours, your wrist will need to do some other movements as well.