Young readers suffering 'Harry Potter headache'

Doctors have identified a new illness - Hogwarts Headache - that is affecting young readers of the Harry Potter books.

It is blamed on the lengthy Harry Potter and the Order Of The Phoenix best-seller and is said to cause a dull pain in the head and sometimes neck and wrist aches.

In a letter to the latest issue of the influential New England Journal of Medicine, Dr Howard Bennett says he was alerted to the problem by a succession of children who visited his surgery in Washington shortly after the book was released in June.

The patients, aged between eight and 10, had been brought in because of lingering headaches.

Dr Bennett quickly ruled out a more serious cause and found that all the children had been reading the 870-page book by JKRowling in marathon sessions. "The kids would be reading six, eight hours a day," said Dr Bennett. "It's a big book."

One of his patients, eight-year-old Lillie Lainoff, says her headaches started the day she got the book, the fifth in the series.

"I would read for a time and I would feel a pain in my head and it would keep going and going and it would keep getting worse," she said.

All the symptoms went away within three days after the book was finished. The children are said to have taken painkillers rather than follow the doctor's recommendation of taking a break from the book.