Gambling and alcohol addiction treatment should be treated together
as a dual disorder. A major study was done in 2002 (and published in
Alcohol Research and Health) that proved that problematic gambling was
more common in people with alcohol abuse or dependence issues. The
study suggested that people who were not addicted to alcohol were less
likely to become addicted to gambling and investigated the idea that
there was no broadly accepted explanation for the concurrence of these
two problems in one person.
Common factors that lead to alcohol addiction treatment seem
to be present in a gambling disorder. For instance decreased function
in the brain may be responsible for both conditions. Brain imaging has
shown that both disorders seem to appear in people with similar brain
sizes. There may also be a genetic linkage that would encourage the
disorders to coexist together.
This study also showed that gamblers were 3.8 times more likely to
drink than non-gamblers. The risk for drinkers to gamble was four times
higher than those who were not drinkers. Out of 100 patients studied
with alcohol dependency fourteen percent also suffered from a gambling
problem. A similar large study in Australia found that 48 percent of alcoholics also seemed to have a gambling problem at one point in their life.
Yet another disturbing finding of this study was that 20% of
recovered alcoholics tended to develop a gambling habit after being
released from alcoholic addiction treatment. The implication of this is
that one habit (gambling) might be substituting for the other (drinking)
once the person has unit.
From: http://www.abttc.net/gambling-and-alcohol-addiction-treatment/
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