STUDY: GAMBLING AFFECTS BRAIN LIKE DRUGS

WASHINGTON - The brains of people anticipating a win at the roulette table
appear to react much like those taking euphoria-inducing drugs.

A team of investigators reports in the current issue of the journal Neuron
that the parts of the brain that respond to the prospects of winning and
losing money while gambling are the same as those that appear to respond to
cocaine and morphine.

The overlap of brain activity seen in the gambling experiment with that
found in earlier studies of drug use indicates, the researchers said, that
the brain uses the same circuitry for "the processing of diverse rewards."

"The results of our gaming experiment coupled with findings from prior
studies of the anticipation and experience of positive and negative
outcomes in humans and laboratory animals, suggest that a network of
interrelated structures ... coordinate the processing of goal-related
stimuli," the team led by Hans Breiter of Massachusetts General Hospital said.

A challenge for the future, Breiter said, is to determine how different
parts of these brain circuits affect the thinking, emotion and motivation
involved in anticipation, evaluation and decision-making.

"Identifying these regions of the brain and mapping the neural pathways
that process the anticipation and 'rewards' associated with drug abuse
would be a tremendous boost to the development of medications or
interventions that could block these circuits and provide other treatment
approaches," said Alan Leshner, director of the National Institute on Drug
Abuse. The research was supported by NIDA, a division of the National
Institutes of Health.

The research team led by Breiter used magnetic resonance imaging to map the
brain responses of 12 men while they participated in a game of chance
involving winning or losing money.

They found that in the gambling experiment, blood flow to the brain changed
in ways similar to that seen in other experiments during an infusion of
cocaine in subjects addicted to that drug and to low doses of morphine in
drug-free individuals.

The changes varied in accordance with the amount of money involved, and a
broadly distributed set of brain regions were involved in anticipating a
win. The more money involved, the more excited the person became.

The primary response to winning, or the prospect of winning, was seen in
the right hemisphere of the brain. The left hemisphere was more active in
response to losing, the researchers reported.