As children, our parents always told us that too much time looking at screens would give us square eyes.
They never said anything about it causing spikes to grow out of our skulls.
But according to researchers in Australia, this could be a strange side effect of constantly being hunched over our phone screens and other hand-held devices.
Scientists from the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland have claimed that an increasing number of young people are developing bony growths on the bottom of their skulls.
These growths are known as enlarged external occipital protuberances or EEOPs.
Dr David Shahar and Associate Professor Mark Sayers made the bizarre discovery while examining more than 200 x-rays of people of all different ages.
They found that almost half of those aged between 18 and 30-years-old had developed the bone growths, ranging in size from 10 millimetres to 30 millimetres.
Further testing, including MRI scans, ruled out the possibility that the growths had occurred due to genetics or as the result of an injury.
These types of growths are common but not normally among people so young.
Instead they are more typically seen in elderly people whose bodies have hunched over, putting a lot of stress on their bones.
Dr Shahar said: "These findings were surprising because typically they take years to develop and are more likely to be seen in the ageing population.
"It is important to understand that, in most cases, bone spurs measure a few single millimetres and yet we found projections of 10 to 30 millimetres in the studied young population."
He added: "We hypothesise that the sustained increase load at that muscle attachment is due to the weight of the head shifting forward with the use of modern technologies for long periods of time.
"Shifting the head forwards results in the transfer of the head’s weight from the bones of the spine to the muscles at the back of the neck and head."
Dr Shahar also warned that while the growths may not cause any damage, they are unlikely to ever go away.
He added: "I have been a clinician for 20 years, and only in the last decade, increasingly I have been discovering that my patients have this growth on the skull."
The research was initially published last year, but the findings have resurfaced online this week.
