Pathological Gambling Is Linked to Lowered Physical Health

Is your gambling problem making you physically sick?

It might be – researchers at the University of Connecticut Health Center have discovered that pathological gamblers are more likely to experience a host of serious medical conditions and are more likely to make use of healthcare services.

To come to this conclusion, they took data from the more than 43 000 participants of the 2001 – 2002 National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions. Of these people, 1% were found to be problem gamblers and less than 0.5% were found to have pathological gambling disorder.

People with pathological gambling disorder were more likely to have been diagnosed with:

Tachycardia
Confidence Interval
Angina
Cirrhosis
Other liver diseases

Gamblers were more likely to be obese, be alcoholics, smoke, have high blood pressure and to have mood or anxiety disorders. The researchers found that even after controlling for all of these factors, gamblers still had greatly increased prevalence rates of the disease listed above.

These gamblers were also more likely to have had a serious injury or received treatment in an emergency room within the last year.¹