Pathological gambling is hereditary: Study

Pathological gambling is a problem that runs in the blood, the researchers from the University of Iowa claim.

Professor Donald W. Black, MD, the study's lead author from the University, said that their work clearly shows that pathological gambling runs in families at a rate higher than for many other behavioral and psychiatric disorders.

He thinks that clinicians and health care providers should be alerted to the fact that if they see a person with pathological gambling, that person is highly likely to have a close relative with similar or the same problem, he added.

The UI study, which was the largest of its kind in the world, recruited and assessed 95 pathological gamblers and 91 control subjects, matched for age, sex, and level of education, from Iowa, as well as 1,075 first-degree adult relatives of the study participants.

They found that 11 percent of the gambling relatives had pathological gambling themselves compared to 1 percent of the control relatives, which means that the odds are about eight times higher in gambling families for pathological gambling to run in those families compared to control families.

The study also found that antisocial personality, social anxiety disorder, and PTSD were more frequent in the relatives of pathological gamblers independent of whether the relative also had pathological gambling.

The study also confirmed that mood disorders like major depression and bipolar disorder, as well as substance abuse, are common in pathological gamblers, but the analysis suggests that this probably is not due to a shared underlying biologic predisposition.

Black said that the findings should be further pursued by neuroscientists as it provides a better chance of finding genes that are linked to the gambling disorder, which could pave the way for improving the understanding of the genetic transmission in general for psychiatric disorders, particularly in the realm of addiction.

The study is published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.