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Comparative analysis of distinct phenotypes in gambling disorder based on gambling preferences
journal contribution
posted on 2015-10-09, 13:27 authored by Laura Moragas, Roser Granero, Randy Stinchfield, Fernando Fernandez-Aranda, Frida Froberg, Neus Aymami, Monica Gomez-Pena, Ana B. Fagundo, Mohammed A. Islam, Amparo del Pino-Gutierrez, Zaida Aguera, Lamprini G Savvidoua, Jon Arcelus, Gemma WitcombGemma Witcomb, Sarah Sauchelli, Jose M. Menchon, Susana Jimenez-MurciaBackground: Studies examining gambling preferences have identified the importance of the type of gambling
practiced on distinct individual profiles. The objectives were to compare clinical, psychopathological and personality
variables between two different groups of individuals with a gambling disorder (strategic and non-strategic
gamblers) and to evaluate the statistical prediction capacity of these preferences with respect to the severity of the
disorder.
Method: A total sample of 2010 treatment-seeking patients with a gambling disorder participated in this
stand-alone study. All were recruited from a single Pathological Gambling Unit in Spain (1709 strategic and 301
non-strategic gamblers). The design of the study was cross-sectional and data were collected at the start of
treatment. Data was analysed using logistic regression for binary outcomes and analysis of variance (ANOVA) for
quantitative responses.
Results: There were significant differences in several socio-demographic and clinical variables, as well as in
personality traits (novelty seeking and cooperativeness). Multiple regression analysis showed harm avoidance and
self-directedness were the main predictors of gambling severity and psychopathology, while age at assessment and
age of onset of gambling behaviour were predictive of gambling severity. Strategic gambling (as opposed to
non-strategic) was significantly associated with clinical outcomes, but the effect size of the relationships was small.
Conclusions: It is possible to identify distinct phenotypes depending on the preference of gambling. While these
phenotypes differ in relation to the severity of the gambling disorder, psychopathology and personality traits, they
can be useful from a clinical and therapeutic perspective in enabling risk factors to be identified and prevention
programs targeting specific individual profiles to be developed.
Funding
Partial financial support was received from Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (PSI2011-28349), FIS (PI11/210; PI14/290), AGAUR (2014 SGR 1672) and PROMOSAM (PSI2014-56303-REDT). CIBER Fisiopatología de la Obesidad y Nutrición (CIBERobn) and CIBER Salud Mental (CIBERsam) are supported by ISCIII.
History
School
- Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences
Published in
BMC PsychiatryCitation
MORAGAS, L. ... et al, 2015. Comparative analysis of distinct phenotypes in gambling disorder based on gambling preferences. BMC Psychiatry, 15, article 86.Publisher
BioMed Central / © The AuthorsVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/Publication date
2015Notes
This is an Open Access article published by Biomed Central and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited.ISSN
1471-244XPublisher version
Language
- en