There's No Silver Bullet For Problem Gambling

Published: Wednesday, December 14, 2005 Online-Casinos.com

THERE'S NO SILVER BULLET FOR PROBLEM GAMBLING

But they're trying for a pill that might help

The Las Vegas Sun carried an interesting article this week which reported on scientific research into drugs that may help in the fight against gambling addiction.

A leading researcher in the field of drug and addiction research, Dr. Jon Grant talked about the work at the Sixth Annual National Council for Responsible Gaming conference held recently at the Mandalay in Las Vegas, revealing that drugs used to treat other addictions could possibly be used to treat compulsive gambling, with some early successful and consistent experimental results.

In a field that is still young, prescribing experimental drugs for gamblers "is one of the best studied areas of gambling addiction," said Grant, assistant professor of psychiatry at Brown University and chief of impulse control disorders at Butler Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island.

"I'm far from believing in a perfect pill," Grant said, adding that compulsive gamblers often suffer from multiple disorders that can complicate treatment. Gamblers also appear to benefit the most from a closely monitored combination of drugs and therapy, he added.

Grant, who has received research money from the National Council, conducted the largest gambling drug study of its kind in 2003.

It found that the drug nalmefene effectively curbed gambling cravings after about 16 weeks of use and that people were "significantly improved" after about 10 weeks of use compared with gamblers who took a placebo, Grant said. The results are to be published in the February issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry.

More than 200 patients in treatment centers across the United States participated in Grant's 2003 study. The researcher said he will be following up with a second study that will involve input from up to 25 different research groups nationwide. Las Vegas gamblers are among those who will participate in the study.

About 11 double-blind studies involving more than 350 patients have so far been conducted using drugs to treat problem gamblers, Grant said. Double-blind studies involve patients and researchers who don't know whether they are receiving or prescribing the drug in question or a placebo.

Around 73 percent of gamblers in these studies got better, meaning they reported minimal to no compulsive gambling symptoms, Grant said. The results of about seven additional studies in which patients and clinicians knew who was taking what also had similar success, he said.

Bo Bernhard, a UNLV sociology professor and director of gambling research at its International Gaming Institute, calls drug research "an important chapter in the history of the field."

Bernhard was involved in overseeing one of the first drug experiments with gamblers. The drug used in the study, Zyprexa, is made by Eli Lilly to treat people with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The experiment, which used Las Vegas gamblers, found that people who took the drug reduced their gambling significantly while those who took a placebo also reduced their gambling but to a lesser extent.

The results weren't conclusive because the drug made participants drowsy and was causing them to sleep excessively, which likely accounted for some of the time they weren't gambling, Bernhard said. However, the research paved the way for future studies, he said.

Compulsive gambling is a complex disorder and isn't easily solved with drugs or other means, Grant said.

"Gambling is one manifestation of perhaps several underlying problems," he said. "We need to figure out how all these symptoms interact. If someone is suffering from depression and is gambling, do we fix one and then the other or do we fix both at the same time?"

Smoking addiction is another complicating factor, he said. In one study, people who were addicted to nicotine had more intense gambling cravings than people who didn't smoke, he said.

Research is a slow, imperfect process, Bernhard said. "There's no magic pill out there. We've been looking at alcoholism for generations and haven't found it."