Abstract

Doc number: 41

Abstract

Backgrounds: Internet gaming addiction (IGA), as a subtype of internet addiction disorder, is rapidly becoming a prevalent mental health concern around the world. The neurobiological underpinnings of IGA should be studied to unravel the potential heterogeneity of IGA. This study investigated the brain functions in IGA patients with resting-state fMRI.

Methods: Fifteen IGA subjects and fourteen healthy controls participated in this study. Regional homogeneity (ReHo) measures were used to detect the abnormal functional integrations.

Results: Comparing to the healthy controls, IGA subjects show enhanced ReHo in brainstem, inferior parietal lobule, left posterior cerebellum, and left middle frontal gyrus. All of these regions are thought related with sensory-motor coordination. In addition, IGA subjects show decreased ReHo in temporal, occipital and parietal brain regions. These regions are thought responsible for visual and auditory functions.

Conclusions: Our results suggest that long-time online game playing enhanced the brain synchronization in sensory-motor coordination related brain regions and decreased the excitability in visual and auditory related brain regions.

Details

Title
Alterations in regional homogeneity of resting-state brain activity in internet gaming addicts
Author
Dong, Guangheng; Huang, Jie; Du, Xiaoxia
Pages
41
Publication year
2012
Publication date
2012
Publisher
BioMed Central
e-ISSN
1744-9081
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1186/1744-9081-8-41
ProQuest document ID
1197253477
Copyright
© 2012 Dong et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.