November 1999

A Review of the National Research Council

by Ken Winters, University of Minnesota Medical School, Department of Psychiatry

Since the Civil War, the federal government has turned to the National Academy of Sciences and its principle-operating agency, the National Research Council (NRC), to provide advice on scientific and technical matters. Recently, Congress asked the National Gaming Impact Study Commission to convene a panel of experts to review the state of research on pathological gambling mandated by the NRC. This NRC committee consisted of a wide range of academicians, including epidemiologists, economists, psychiatrists, psychologists, and criminologists. The product of this committee's year-long work was the publication Pathological Gambling: A Critical Review, the first national effort to summarize existing knowledge on pathological gambling.

While gambling research in the U.S. has spanned nearly 20 years, the NRC's main conclusion was sobering: "In all the aspects of pathological gambling considered by the Committee, we found much of the extant research to be of limited value."

Fortunately, the NRC Committee viewed the more recent work on par with contemporary standards for social and behavioral research. This body of research led them to reach several conclusions.

• It is estimated that 1.5% of U.S. adults have been pathological gamblers at some time in their lives, and that, in a given year, 0.9% of the U.S. adults are pathological gamblers.
• Men are more likely than women to be pathological gamblers but the literature on sub-populations is too under-developed to determine the degree to which the elderly, the poor, and minority groups have disproportionate high rates of pathological gambling.
• Rates of pathological gambling among adolescents are consistently higher compared to adults, but the Committee cautions that adolescent measures of pathological gambling are not always comparable to adult measures and that different thresholds for adolescent gambling problems may exist.
• While there is little doubt that more Americans are gambling and are wagering more, trend studies and longitudinal studies are needed to determine if the rate of pathological gambling is increasing in the U.S.
• Pathological gambling is familial; that is, it runs in families. Genetic, twin, and neuroscience studies suggest that this familial pattern may be due, in part, to genetic influences.
• People who suffer from pathological gambling often have other behavioral problems, including alcoholism, drug addiction, mood disorders, and personality disorders.
• Although gambling probably has net economic benefits, particularly in economically depressed communities, there are insufficient data to meaningfully estimate the overall costs and benefits of gambling to a community.
• Descriptive treatment studies indicate that pathological gamblers who seek treatment generally improve, but it is not known the extent to which people recover on their own, or which type of treatment works best for subtypes of problem gamblers.

Where does this all leave us? Given the relative infancy of research on problem gambling, every major question on this topic can benefit from more research. As gambling becomes more popular in our society, and as new technology holds the potential to change the subjective experience of gambling, and make it more accessible to more people, the Committee recommends that it is incumbent on state and federal agencies to support more research on this emerging addiction.

Gambling Problems Resource Center
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