GAMBLING DISORDERS 360°

Do you know of a researcher, educator or a recent publication that has made an impact in the field of gambling disorder research? The National Center for Responsible Gaming (NCRG), the largest private source of funding for peer-reviewed research on disordered gambling in the U.S., annually recognizes outstanding contributions to the field of gambling studies with the NCRG Scientific Achievement Award. This year’s award will be presented during the NCRG Conference on Gambling and Addiction in Las Vegas, October 2-4, 2011. The deadline for nominations is August 1, 2011.

The American Psychiatric Association (APA) has proposed new criteria for a diagnosis of pathological gambling (PG) in the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, slated for publication in 2013.  As reported in Issues and Insights and discussed at the 2010 NCRG Conference on Gambling and Addiction, the proposed revisions included moving PG from the impulse control category into a new classification, “addiction and related disorders.” It also proposes dropping illegal acts from the 10 criteria and possibly reducing the number of criteria needed for a diagnosis from five to four. A new review article by Howard J. Shaffer and Ryan Martin in the 2011 Annual Review of Clinical Psychology (Shaffer & Martin, 2011) provides a critical review of these recommendations.

If you have been following the Gambling Disorders 360˚ blog, you have heard about the NCRG’s many accomplishments in 2010. To highlight our successful year and look forward to the NCRG’s 2011 initiatives, we released the NCRG’s 2010 Annual Report online this week. We also began some of the 2011 social media initiatives as the NCRG officially launched its Twitter account, @theNCRG!

The National Center for Responsible Gaming (NCRG) presented the first installment of the 2011 NCRG Webinar Series to more than 250 participants in March – one of the highest attended sessions for the NCRG. Led by Dr. Jon Grant, M.D., the webinar was titled “Gambling Disorders: What Addiction Professionals Need To Know” and cosponsored by NAADAC, the Association for Addiction Professionals.  Visit the NCRG website for an archived version of the presentation.

The application deadline for the NCRG’s Seed Grants is quickly approaching – May 2, 2011. Make sure you download the announcement and application form to apply today!

Have you ever been screened for a health problem? The answer is probably yes if you’ve ever been questioned by your doctor about symptoms or responded to a telephone survey about health. There are numerous screening instruments used by clinicians to determine if a client has a gambling problem, and some often appear in general population surveys to research the prevalence of the disorder. The Division of Addictions at Cambridge Health Alliance, a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School, recently released the Brief Biosocial Gambling Screen (BBGS) to help people decide on their own whether to seek a formal evaluation of their gambling behavior.  Development of the screen was funded by the NCRG.

Why do so many people relapse when they are trying to stop gambling? It has been estimated that 50 to 75 percent of gamblers resume gambling after attempting to quit (N. M. Petry et al., 2006), but what are the thoughts, feelings and situations that precede these events? Researchers who study alcohol and drug abuse – disorders with similarly high rates of relapse –  have developed a questionnaire designed to answer these questions for their audiences. A recent study published in the journal Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology attempts to validate this same type of questionnaire for people with gambling disorders (Nancy M Petry, Rash, & Blanco, 2010). The new study attempts to extend and validate Petry’s previous work adapting the Inventory of Drinking Situations for gambling situations (called the Inventory of Gambling Situations, IGS).

The relationship between the brain chemical dopamine and disordered gambling has been well-established over the past several years (we discussed this relationship in the context of Parkinson's Disease in the July 2010 Issues and Insights). Dopamine is associated with the reward system of the brain, which affects feelings of enjoyment and behavior reinforcement. It and other brain chemicals are, by their very nature, difficult to observe and thus difficult to translate into preventive applications. To bridge the gap between brain chemistry and disordered behavior, researchers can link the two with quantifiable emotions like excitement. The most recent edition of The WAGER (Worldwide Addiction Gambling Education Report) reviews a study that looks at those factors as they relate to pathological gambling.  

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).