赌博成瘾也是病？

Gambling addicts don't learn from their mistakes, according to a study published today in the open access journal Clinical Practice and Epidemiology in Mental Health. The problem could be explained by a kind of mental rigidity that leads to harmful compulsive behaviour in sufferers.

根据今天发表在Clinical Practice and Epidemiology in Mental Health的公开杂志的一项研究表明,赌博上瘾的人并不能借鉴他们的错误.这个问题可以解释为受害者的某种精神僵化而导致的有害的或强制性的行为.

Donatella Marazziti of the University of Pisa and colleagues explain that pathological gambling revolves around the uncontrolled impulse to gamble, with serious consequences for the individual and their family. Its cause, however, is unclear. Scientists have suggested that environmental factors and a genetic predisposition play a part, affecting chemical signals in the brain.

比萨大学的Donatella Marazziti和他的同事解释说,病态赌博不受控制的冲动的以赌博为中心,对个人和他们的家庭造成严重的后果.不过其原因如何,目前还不清楚.科学家们认为，环境因素和某种遗传性易患病体制都会起到作用,影响到大脑的化学信号.

In order to home in on the underlying cause, the Pisa team evaluated a group of 15 male and 5 female pathological gamblers. They carried out various neuropsychological tests in order to explore which areas of the brain are related to the disorder. The tests included the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST), the Wechsler Memory Scale revised (WMS-R) and the Verbal Associative Fluency Test (FAS). Each of which can assess particular problem-solving abilities. They compared the results with those of healthy individuals.

为了研究家庭的潜在作用, Pisa小组评估了一组由15个男性和5个女性组成的病态赌徒。他们通过开展各种形式的神经心理测验，以探测大脑的哪一部分与不受控制有关.测试包括wcst,WMS-R,FAS这三种。每一项测试都能评估特殊的解决问题的能力。他们将结果与健康人进行了比较.

They found that the pathological gamblers scored well in all tests except the card sorting. In this test, the patients had great difficulty in finding different ways to solve each problem in the test as they worked through them, whereas the healthy individuals got better with practice.

他们发现了病态赌徒在各种测试中都取得了较好的成绩,除了卡片分类.在这项测试中,当病人去完成这些问题时,他们有难发现不同的方法去解决每一个问题,而健康的人通过实践会做的更好.

\"Our findings show that in spite of normal intellectual, linguistic and visual-spatial abilities, the pathological gamblers could not learn from their mistakes to look for alternative solutions in the WCST,\" say the researchers. This suggests that there are differences in the part of the brain involved in this kind of problem solving, the prefrontal region. \"These differences might provoke a sort of cognitive 'rigidity' that predisposes a person to the development of impulsive or compulsive behaviour, leading to pathological gambling.\"

研究人员说,\"我们的研究结果显示,在wcst测试中,虽然病态赌徒有正常智商,语言和视觉空间的能力,他们依旧不能借鉴他们的错误去寻找其他的解决办法\".这表明,大脑的某部分涉及此类问题的解决与大脑前额区域有差异.\"这些差异可能会刺激某种有感知的'刚性',使一个人偏向于冲动的或强制性行为的发展,最终导致病态赌博\".