Altered Brain Activities Associated with Craving and Cue Reactivity in People with Internet Gaming Disorder: Evidence from the Comparison with Recreational Internet Game Users.

Lingxiao Wang,Xiaoyue Liu,Hui Li,Lingdan Wu,Yifan Wang,Xiaoxia Du,Guangheng Dong

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01150

Abstract

Although the neural substrates of cue reactivity in Internet gaming disorder (IGD) have been examined in previous studies, most of these studies focused on the comparison between IGD subjects and healthy controls, which cannot exclude a potential effect of cue-familiarity. To overcome this limitation, the current study focuses on the comparison between IGD subjects and recreational Internet game users (RGU) who play online games recreationally but do not develop dependence. Data from 40 RGU and 30 IGD subjects were collected while they were performing an event-related cue reactivity task in the fMRI scanner. The results showed that the IGD subjects were associated with enhanced activation in the left orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and decreased activation in the right anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), right precuneus, left precentral gyrus and right postcentral gyrus in comparison with the RGU subjects. OFC is involved in reward evaluation and ACC is implicated in executive control function based on previous researches. Moreover, the activation of OFC were correlated with the desire for game-playing. Thus, the higher activation in OFC might suggests high desire for game playing, and the lower activation in ACC might indicates impaired ability in inhibiting the urge to gaming-related stimuli in IGD subjects. Additionally, decreased activation in the precuneus, the precentral and postcentral gyrus may suggest the deficit in disentangling from game-playing stimuli. These findings explain why IGD subjects develop dependence on game-playing while RGU subjects can play online games recreationally and prevent the transition from voluntary game-playing to eventually IGD.

Highlights

We examined the brain activities in the cue-reactivity task between the Internet gaming disorder (IGD) and recreational Internet game users (RGU) group (Figure 3 and Table 2)
orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) compared to the RGU group, and decreased brain activities in the right anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), right precuneus, left precentral gyrus and right postcentral gyrus in the IGD group when comparing to the RGU group
The present study examined different brain activation pattern between subjects with IGD and RGU using an event-related cue reactivity task

Summary

Introduction

Internet gaming disorder (IGD), the most prevalent (57.5 percent) subtype of Internet addiction disorder (IAD) (Han et al, 2012; Ko et al, 2013; Chen et al, 2015), is defined as the incapacity to control the desire for obsessive online game playing, which leads to various functional impairments, such as social, financial, occupational, and behavioral difficulties (Young, 1998; Achab et al, 2011; Dong et al, 2012b,c, 2013b, 2014a; Ko, 2014; Ko et al, 2014; Petry et al, 2014). Studies on the IGD have reported that compared to healthy controls (HC), subjects with IGD showed aberrant activation in OFC, DLPFC, ACC, precuneus, caudate nucleus in response to gaming pictures (Ko et al, 2008; Han et al, 2010; Sun et al, 2012; Liu et al, 2016; Zhang et al, 2016)

Methods

Results

Conclusion