Brain scans show vulnerability to gaming addiction in teens

Playing video games is a rite of passage for many adolescents, but for some, it could also be the first step to a gaming addiction.

“A number one concern for parents of children and teenagers is how much screen time and how much gaming is enough gaming and how to figure out where to draw the line,” said John Foxe, Ph.D., director of the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience at the University of Rochester and co-author of a study published in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions that discovered a key marker in the brain of teens who develop gaming addiction symptoms. “These data begin to give us some answers.”

Researchers looked at data collected from 6,143 identified video game users ages 10–15 over four years. In the first year, researchers took brain scans using an fMRI as participants completed the task of pushing a button fast enough to receive a $5 reward. Researchers subsequently had the same participants answer Video Game Addiction Questionnaires over the next three years.

They found that the participants with more symptoms of gaming addiction over time showed lower brain activity in the region involved in decision-making and reward processing during the initial brain scan taken four years earlier.

Previous research in adults has provided similar insight, showing that this blunted response to reward anticipation is associated with higher symptoms of gaming addiction and suggests that reduced sensitivity to rewards, in particular non-gaming rewards, may play a role in problematic gaming.

“Gaming itself is not unhealthy, but there is a line, and our study clearly shows that some people are more susceptible to symptoms of gaming addiction than others,” said Daniel Lopez, Ph.D, a postdoctoral fellow at the Developmental Brain Imaging Lab at Oregon Health & Science University and first author of the study.

“I think for parents, that’s really key because you could restrict children entirely from gaming, but that’s going to be really, really difficult and crucial to their development as well as their social development. But we want to know the right balance between healthy gaming and unhealthy gaming, and this research starts to point us in the direction of the neural markers we can use to help us identify who might be at risk of unhealthy gaming behaviors.”

Longitudinal study is transforming teen brain health

The data used in this research came from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study. Launched in 2015, the ABCD Study follows a cohort of 11,878 children from pre-adolescence to adulthood to create baseline standards of brain development.

The open-source data model has allowed researchers nationwide to shed light on various facets of social, emotional, cognitive, and physical development during adolescence. The University of Rochester joined the study in 2017 and is one of 21 sites collecting this data from nearly 340 participants. Ed Freedman, Ph.D., professor of Neuroscience at the University and co-principal investigator of the university study site, led this recent research on gaming.

“The large data set that contains this understudied developmental window is transforming recommendations for everything from sleep to screen time. And now we have specific brain regions that are associated with gaming addiction in teens,” Freedman said.

“This allows us to ask other questions that may help us understand if there are ways to identify at-risk kids and if there are other behaviors or recommendations that could mitigate risk.”

“We’re very proud that this Rochester cohort is a part of this national and international dialogue around adolescent health,” said Foxe, who is also a co-PI on the ABCD Study in Rochester. “We have already seen how this data, including the data gathered here from our community, is having a major impact on policy across the world.”