A new study lends support to what many experts believe--that compulsive gambling is like drug addiction.
Gamblers and drug addicts describe similar cravings and highs. To see if each group's brains have similar abnormalities, a team led by Christian Büchel, a neurologist at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf in Hamburg, Germany, used functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare the brains of 12 compulsive slot machine players and 12 controls while both groups engaged in a simple gamble: choosing one of two face-down playing cards. They gained or lost a euro depending on whether the card was red or black.
Büchel's team found that winners showed increased blood flow to the ventral striatum, a key part of the brain's reward system that involves the neurotransmitter dopamine. But the gamblers exhibited significantly less blood flow than did the controls, indicating a more sluggish reward system, the researchers report online 9 January in Nature Neuroscience.
The result fits with the notion that gamblers compensate for deficiencies in their brain reward systems by overdoing and getting hooked. Addiction researcher Eric Nestler, a psychiatrist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, says this looks like the "tolerance" to reward seen in drug addicts that leads to the need for increasingly higher doses. But he says it would be useful to determine whether gamblers also experience "sensitization"--which involves greater responses to rewarding effects of the drug and which "may be the more critical feature" in addiction.
CREDIT: ROYALTY-FREE/CORBIS | 
