Comorbid behavioral and substance-related addictions in young population with and without gambling disorder

ABSTRACT

People with gambling disorder (GD) often experience co-occurring addictive behaviors, especially at young ages. This paper aims at examining cognitive biases, emotion dysregulation, and coping strategies in people with and without GD, as well as comparing the comorbid addictions profiles of those in clinical versus community-based sites. A sample from the general population comprising 250 adolescents and young individuals, and a clinical sample of 31 patients with problematic gambling or GD were recruited. Results showed that GD severity was positively related to alcohol abuse, drugs abuse (in the women group) and buying-shopping (in the men group) in the community sample. In the clinical sample, GD severity was positively related to gaming and instant messaging, and the highest levels in cognitive biases were related to gambling behaviors. Also, the highest emotion dysregulation scores and the highest scores for difficulties in coping strategies were associated with the comorbid presence of GD and other addictions, closely followed by GD presence without other addictions. These results provide evidence of the existence of underlying risk factors shared by GD and its comorbid addictions, which suggests the understanding and treatment of co-occurring addictions in a comprehensive rather than individual manner.

KEYWORDS:

• Gambling disorder
• behavioral addictions
• comorbidity
• buying-shopping
• food addiction
• substance use disorder
• adolescence

Acknowledgements

We thank CERCA Programme / Generalitat de Catalunya for institutional support. We also thank that this manuscript and research was supported by grants from the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, the Delegación del Gobierno para el Plan Nacional sobre Drogas, and Instituto de Salud Carlos III. Finally, we thank the support of the Secretariat for Universities and Research of the Ministry of Business and Knowledge of the Government of Catalonia.

Disclosure Statement

Funding sources

Financial support was received through the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (grant RTI2018-101837-B-100). FIS PI14/00290, FIS PI17/01167 received aid from the Ministerio de Sanidad, Servicios Sociales e Igualdad. The research was also funded by the Delegación del Gobierno para el Plan Nacional sobre Drogas (2017I067 and 2019I47), CIBER Fisiologia Obesidad y Nutrición (CIBERobn) and CIBER Salud Mental (CIBERSAM), both of which are initiatives of ISCIII. We thank CERCA Programme / Generalitat de Catalunya for institutional support. Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER) “Una manera de hacer Europa” / “A way to build Europe”. GMB is supported by a postdoctoral grant from FUNCIVA. TMM and CVA are supported by a predoctoral grant awarded by the Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte (FPU16/02087; FPU16/01453).With the support of the Secretariat for Universities and Research of the Ministry of Business and Knowledge of the Government of Catalonia. The funders had no role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.