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Published on: November 9, 2019
White matter tract integrity in treatment-resistant gambling disorder
Samuel R Chamberlain1, Katherine Derbyshire1, Richard E Daws1
1Samuel R. Chamberlain, MB/Bchir, PhD, MRCPsych, Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge, Cambridge and Cambridge and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust (CPFT), Cambridge, UK; Katherine Derbyshire, BS, Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Neuroscience, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA; Richard E. Daws, Msc, Computational, Cognitive & Clinical Neuroimaging Lab, Imperial College London, London, UK; Brian L. Odlaug, MPH, Department of Public Health, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark; Eric W. Leppink, BA, Jon E. Grant, JD, MD, MPH, Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Neuroscience, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA.
Background:
Gambling disorder is a relatively common psychiatric disorder recently re-classified within the DSM-5 under the category of 'substance-related and addictive disorders'.
Aims:
To compare white matter integrity in patients with gambling disorder with healthy controls; to explore relationships between white matter integrity and disease severity in gambling disorder.
Method:
In total, 16 participants with treatment-resistant gambling disorder and 15 healthy controls underwent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). White matter integrity was analysed using tract-based spatial statistics.
Results:
Gambling disorder was associated with reduced fractional anisotropy in the corpus callosum and superior longitudinal fasciculus. Fractional anisotropy in distributed white matter tracts elsewhere correlated positively with disease severity.
Conclusions:
Reduced corpus callosum fractional anisotropy is suggestive of disorganised/damaged tracts in patients with gambling disorder, and this may represent a trait/vulnerability marker for the disorder. Future research should explore these measures in a larger sample, ideally incorporating a range of imaging markers (for example functional MRI) and enrolling unaffected first-degree relatives of patients.
