Abstract
Online gaming addiction, as the most popular subtype of Internet addiction, had gained more and more attention from the whole world. However, the structural differences in cortical thickness of the brain between adolescents with online gaming addiction and healthy controls are not well unknown; neither was its association with the impaired cognitive control ability. High-resolution magnetic resonance imaging scans from late adolescence with online gaming addiction (n = 18) and age-, education- and gender-matched controls (n = 18) were acquired. The cortical thickness measurement method was employed to investigate alterations of cortical thickness in individuals with online gaming addiction. The color-word Stroop task was employed to investigate the functional implications of the cortical thickness abnormalities. Imaging data revealed increased cortical thickness in the left precentral cortex, precuneus, middle frontal cortex, inferior temporal and middle temporal cortices in late adolescence with online gaming addiction; meanwhile, the cortical thicknesses of the left lateral orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), insula, lingual gyrus, the right postcentral gyrus, entorhinal cortex and inferior parietal cortex were decreased. Correlation analysis demonstrated that the cortical thicknesses of the left precentral cortex, precuneus and lingual gyrus correlated with duration of online gaming addiction and the cortical thickness of the OFC correlated with the impaired task performance during the color-word Stroop task in adolescents with online gaming addiction. The findings in the current study suggested that the cortical thickness abnormalities of these regions may be implicated in the underlying pathophysiology of online gaming addiction.
Highlights
As an important period between childhood and adulthood, adolescence is encompassed by alterations in physical, psychological, and social development [1]
Our results demonstrated that the rate of online gaming addiction was about 12.1% in our small sample investigation
Effects, there were several regions with significantly reduced cortical thickness in adolescents with online gaming addiction compared to healthy controls, which consisted of the left lateral orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) (29%), insula cortex (210%) and lingual gyrus (210%), along with the right postcentral gyrus (213%), entorhinal cortex (213%), and inferior parietal cortex (210%) (Figure 1)
Summary
As an important period between childhood and adulthood, adolescence is encompassed by alterations in physical, psychological, and social development [1]. As one of the common mental health problems amongst Chinese adolescents, Internet addiction disorder (IAD) is currently becoming more and more serious [5,6]. As the most important subtype of IAD, had gained more and more attention from the whole world and especially from east Asia, e.g. China and Korea. Because of its growing prevalence, IAD and online gaming addiction has drawn scientific attention from academia around the world [5,6,7,8,9,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18]. There is currently no standardized treatment for IAD due to the lack of a clear understanding of the mechanisms underlying this disease [12]
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