Researchers ‘see’ vulnerability to gaming addiction in the adolescent brain

“The biggest concern for parents of children and teens is how much screen time and how much gaming is enough, and how to determine where the boundaries are,” said Dr. John Fox, director of the Del Monte Neuroscience Institute at the University of Rochester. and co-author of a study published today in Nature Journal of Behavioral Addictions Researchers have discovered key markers in the brains of teenagers who show symptoms of gaming addiction. “This data is starting to give us some answers.”

The researchers studied data collected over four years from 6,143 video game users aged 10 to 15 years. In the first year, the researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan the brains of participants while they pressed a button fast enough to receive a $5 reward. The researchers then had the same participants answer a video game addiction questionnaire over the next three years. They found that over time, participants who had more gaming addiction symptoms had lower brain activity in areas involved in decision-making and reward processing in their initial brain scans taken four years earlier. Previous research in adults has provided similar insights, suggesting that this blunted response to reward anticipation is associated with higher symptoms of gaming addiction and suggesting that reduced sensitivity to rewards, particularly non-gaming rewards, may play a role in problematic play a role in the game.

“Gaming itself is not unhealthy, but there is a line, and our research clearly shows that some people are more susceptible to gaming addiction symptoms than others,” said Dr. Daniel Lopez, 23, a postdoc in the Developmental Brain. Imaging Laboratory at the University of Health and Sciences and first author of the study. “I think for parents, it’s really critical because you can completely limit your child’s gaming, but it’s really, really difficult and critical for their development and social development. But we want to know about healthy gaming. The right balance between gaming and unhealthy gaming behaviors, this research starts to point us in the direction of neural markers that we can use to help us identify who may be at risk for unhealthy gaming behaviors.

Longitudinal study is transforming adolescent brain health

This study used data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study. The ABCD study, launched in 2015, follows a cohort of 11,878 children from pre-adolescence to adulthood to establish baseline standards for brain development. Open source models enable researchers across the country to uncover various aspects of social, emotional, cognitive and physical development during adolescence. The University of Rochester, which joined the study in 2017, is one of 21 sites collecting this data from nearly 340 participants. Dr. Ed Friedman, a professor of neuroscience at the university and co-principal investigator of the university’s research center, led the latest gaming study.

“Large data sets that include this understudied window of development are changing recommendations on everything from sleep to screen time. We now have specific brain regions associated with gaming addiction in adolescents,” Friedman said. “This allows us to ask additional questions that may help us understand whether there are ways to identify children at high risk and whether there are other behaviors or recommendations that might mitigate the risk.”

“We are very proud that the Rochester cohort is participating in the national and international conversation about adolescent health,” said Foxe, who also co-leads the Rochester ABCD study. “We’ve seen how this data, including data collected from our communities, can have a significant impact on policy around the world.”

Other authors Journal of Behavioral Addictions Researchers include Dr. Edwin van Wijngaarden of the University of Rochester Medical Center and Dr. Wesley Thompson of the Laureate Brain Institute. The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health and the Center for Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research at the University of Rochester.