Current research into problem gambling

“The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.......” - Sir William Bragg (1862-1942)

German researchers claim gambling is as addictive as smoking, drinking and taking narcotic drugs. Gerhard Meyer and his colleagues at the University of Bremen found that gambling for money caused an increase in the stress hormone cortisol in the saliva of players.

Research at the University of Sydney suggests that excessive gambling leads to a breakdown in the reward and punishment networks of the brain. This makes it difficult for problem gamblers to control their addiction.

Serotonin is a chemical in the brain that plays a key role in regulating mood and behavior. Norepinephrine, a hormone released in response to stress, has been linked to arousal and risk-taking in compulsive gamblers. Brain cells release dopamine as part of the reward system through which you learn to seek pleasurable stimuli such as food and sex, and dopamine plays a role in developing addiction.

Currently, the dominant philosophy of addiction presumes that particular chemicals are inherently addictive. This view suggests that the psychoactive property of the drug causes addiction. The conventional wisdom suggests that the use of a psychoactive substance leads directly to abuse, dependence and inevitably addiction with all of its associated impairments. The only uncertainty is how long it will take to become addicted.

Guided by this approach, the treatment and diagnosis of addiction has been specific to substances, and tailored to the assumption that dependence, characterized by neuroadaptation (e.g., tolerance and withdrawal), and addiction are necessarily related. However, new research reveals that there are common underlying characteristics to many different manifestations of addiction, including behavioral expressions of addiction such as excessive gambling.

Further, dependence and addiction are not necessarily mutually inclusive. For example, one can have an addiction without being dependent on dependence producing drugs (e.g., gambling); similarly, one can become dependent on drugs without developing addiction, (e.g., using opioids for post-operative pain relief even though neuroadaption has occurred).

Taken together, this evidence suggests that various forms of addiction arise from similar causes, and that the specific objects of addiction (e.g., cigarettes or slot machines) are less important to the development of addiction than previously thought.

This new understanding makes room for a broader characterization of addiction that includes both substances and behaviors. A recent article by Shaffer, LaPlante, LaBrie, Kidman, Donato, and Stanton (2004), proposes a syndrome model for classifying addiction; the authors define syndrome as “a cluster of symptoms and signs related to an abnormal underlying condition”. This system of classification incorporates the risk-factors and consequences common to all addictions, and simultaneously accounts for the elements that distinguish various forms of addiction from one another.

According to Shaffer et al.’s syndrome model, all addictive disorders generally follow a particular developmental pattern. That is, addiction seems to arise from similar antecedent risk-factors and develop into addiction as a result of exposure to and experience with different objects of addiction. Expression of the addiction syndrome depends on the interaction of the individual and the given object of addiction.

Shaffer et al. (2004) suggest that a person’s risk for developing an addiction depends on a combination of three factors: personal vulnerabilities (e.g., genetics), exposure to an object or activity, and one’s experiences with that potential object of addiction.

Source: The Wager—www.basisonline.org/wager

Date published: 11/1/2005

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