The World Health Organization (WHO) has tagged compulsive video gaming as a mental health condition in its updated international classification of diseases (ICD) manual, released on Monday.

The classification of gaming disorder as a diagnosable condition, gives mental health professionals, a basis for setting up treatment and identifying risks for the addictive behaviour. It describes the disorder as impaired control over gaming, increasing priority given to gaming over other activities to the extent that gaming takes precedence over other interests and daily activities.

Although a small percentage of people across the world deal with this disorder, WHO says that the number suffering from this mental health condition is enough to study the behavioural pattern and create a treatment program.

“For gaming disorder to be diagnosed, the behaviour pattern must be of sufficient severity to result in significant impairment in personal, family, social, educational, occupational or other important areas of functioning and would normally have been evident for at least 12 months,” WHO said in a statement.

Interest in online gaming has been on a spiral growth over the years, with extreme cases resulting into death tagged to marathon video games sessions.

A search on the internet points to a 35-year-old woman who died last year after playing the World of Tanks video game, broadcast on video game streaming service Twitch, for 24 hours.

Others include a man in South Korea who died after playing video games for 86 hours, and a series of similar deaths in China, Taiwan, Russia and the United Kingdom.

According to WHO, the international classification of diseases is the “bedrock for health statistics, codifying the human condition from birth to death, including all factors that influence health. These statistics form the basis for healthcare provision everywhere and is at the core of mapping disease trends and epidemics and helping governments decide how money is spent on health services. 

Without the ICD’s ability to provide standardized, consistent data, each country or region would have its own classifications that would most likely only be relevant locally. The eleventh edition of ICD was released on Monday to allow member states time to plan implementation before it is presented for adoption at the 2019 World Health Assembly.