Assessing Retinal Microvascular Characteristics in Casual Video Game Players vs. Physically Active Controls: Preliminary Assessment

Background: Prolonged sitting is associated with lower cardiovascular health. However, the generalizability of this observation to casual video game players, who often sit several hours a day while gaming, remains understudied. To address this research gap, casual video game players were compared to physically active controls using retinal vessel characteristics as a proxy of cardiovascular health status. Methods: Twenty-eight healthy male participants (14 casual video game players and 14 controls) aged between 18 and 30 years (mean age: 23.78 ±2.92 years) were recruited. In addition to demographic parameters (e.g., regular physical activity [PA], Body-Mass-Index [BMI]), Pre- and post-exercise CRAE, CRVE, and AVR metrics were obtained utilizing a static Retinal Vessel Analyzer surrounding the submaximal test (SXT). Data was analyzed via a two-way repeated measures ANOVA. Results: No significant group differences were observed concerning demographic (e.g., PA) or physiological variables (e.g., CRAE, CRVE, and AVR), despite a higher BMI in video game players ( p = .046). After the SXT, only video game players showed a decrease in CRAE ( p < .05). Conclusions: Our findings show that casual video game players and physically active controls neither differ at baseline nor in response to a SXT concerning their retinal vessel characteristics or their reactivity, suggesting that casual video gaming is not necessarily detrimental to cardiovascular health if one remains sufficiently physically active The fact that this study was conducted exclusively on university students and the exploratory nature of the study involving multiple comparisons, these preliminary findings should be interpreted cautiously and serve to generate hypotheses for future, more robustly powered research.