Research Update

Why do some children start gambling at a young age while others do not? Theorists have suggested that the answer to this question is some combination of individual traits and environmental factors, both nature and nurture, but it is not yet understood which traits and factors have more of an influence on behavior. To address this question, researchers must examine the same children over a length of time (in what is called a longitudinal study) in order to see what traits in a younger child predict gambling behavior as the child ages. A recent study of Canadian children published in the journal Psychology of Addictive Behaviors took just this approach (Vitaro & Wanner, 2011). The researchers gathered information about 1,125 children and their families between the ages of six and eight, and then measured their gambling behavior at the age of 10. The findings suggest that preventing gambling in children will require a multifaceted approach that addresses all of the potential risk factors involved.

Measuring addictive behaviors accurately is very difficult. Among the many complications are recruiting subjects, relying on their memory and self-report and quantifying the difference between pathological actions and actions that are merely unusual or uncommon. (Jerome Wakefield, Ph.D., discussed this topic in detail at the NCRG conference 2010.) One particularly difficult aspect of studying addiction is the diagnostic screening instrument (when scored, the instrument shows whether or not a person should be diagnosed with a particular disorder). Diagnostic screens of all kinds pose the problem of advancement versus consistency: It is always possible to make a newer and better instrument, but a new instrument means that studies conducted with the older one cannot be directly compared to studies conducted with the new instrument. This tension dictates that new instruments must be shown as better along several lines to make them worth implementing. Two researchers at the forefront of this discussion for gambling disorders are Erica Fortune and Adam Goodie, Ph.D., at the University of Georgia. Fortune and Goodie recently published a study, partly funded by a grant from the NCRG to Dr. Goodie, that compares the performance of two diagnostic screens in a population of college students (Fortune & Goodie, 2010).   

How much college students gamble, and to what extent they suffer from gambling disorders, is an area of great concern in the United States. It is well established that college students suffer from high rates of alcohol and other substance use disorders, and do so in larger numbers than demographically similar non-college students. It is also commonly known that alcohol misuse and gambling disorders are similar in many ways; both cause craving and withdrawal symptoms, have similar neurological characteristics and follow similar clinical courses. This fact raises questions about whether gambling disorders may be found in larger numbers in college populations than in non-college populations with similar demographics. To answer this question, researchers at the Research Institute on Addictions at the University at Buffalo, N.Y., analyzed data from 1,000 representative respondents ages 18-21. Their findings were published in the Journal of American College Health (Barnes, Welte, Hoffman, & Tidwell, 2010).

The Task Force on College Gambling Policies issued a report in 2009 recommending that student health professionals screen for gambling problems among students engaged in risky behaviors. Since the release of this report, new research has been published that provides evidence that a single question can open up information about risky behaviors.

Addiction researchers have found associations between numerous addictive behaviors, with individuals often being involved with many addictive substances and behaviors at the same time. Though this relationship is common, it is not well understood. The intermingling relationships of less thoroughly studied addictive behaviors, such as gambling and prescription drug misuse (PDM), are particularly unclear. A recent study led by Cheryl Currie, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Alberta, Canada, was published in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry and explores the relationship between prescription drug misuse, demographics and addictive behaviors including gambling (Currie, Schopflocher, & Wild, 2011). Currie won the Outstanding Poster Award at the 2010 NCRG Conference on Gambling and Addiction, and discussed early findings from this study with us in an audio interview conducted at the conference.       

Treatment and prevention are two of the most important and challenging areas for addiction researchers. Prevention is a particularly difficult undertaking even when working with the most understood disorders, and can be even more difficult in an emerging field such as gambling disorders. One way to advance prevention research is to better understand the relationship between pathological gambling (PG) and psychological traits that have been more thoroughly studied. One recent study by Erica Fortune and Adam Goodie, Ph.D., at the University of Georgia, takes this approach. The study, which was published in the December 2010 edition of the Journal of Gambling Studies (Fortune & Goodie, 2009), was partially funded by a grant from the NCRG to Dr. Goodie and attempts to clarify the relationship between PG and sensation seeking.

Society’s beliefs about a health condition can have a huge impact on the people who suffer from the disorder. Public opinion can influence public health policy, public and private harm minimization efforts, research funds, and treatment support. At the individual level, negative public views of a disease and the stigma it creates can strongly discourage individuals from admitting that they have the problem and seeking treatment. There is little data available on public opinion of gambling disorders; however, a new study published in the Journal of Gambling Studies fills this void with a systematic examination of public opinion on gambling disorders (Cunningham, Cordingley, Hodgins, & Toneatto, 2011).

Society’s beliefs about a health condition can have a huge impact on the people who suffer from the disorder. Public opinion can influence public health policy, public and private harm minimization efforts, research funds, and treatment support. At the individual level, negative public views of a disease and the stigma it creates can strongly discourage individuals from admitting that they have the problem and seeking treatment. There is little data available on public opinion of gambling disorders; however, a new study published in the Journal of Gambling Studies fills this void with a systematic examination of public opinion on gambling disorders (Cunningham, Cordingley, Hodgins, & Toneatto, 2011).

While there have been a number of studies conducted on youth gambling, there is no clear consensus about whether gambling rates in this population are increasing, decreasing, or staying the same. Recent reviews of the literature have yielded mixed conclusions and found a variety of results depending on when, where, and how the research was conducted (e.g., Volberg, Gupta, Griffiths, Olason, & Delfabbro, 2010; Jacobs, 2004).

Although pathological gambling (PG) has been recognized as a psychological disorder since 1980, there are still no FDA-approved medications to treat the disorder. Until now, most pharmacological treatments for PG have been adapted from treatments from other addictive disorders such as alcohol dependence. A recently published article in the journal Psychopharmacology reports on the use of a drug from an unexpected source: a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease (Grant, Chamberlain, Odlaug, Potenza, & Kim, 2010).