Internet-video Gaming: Symptoms, Epidemiology, Neurophysiology and Interventional Aspects

Abstract

Excessive perseverance with video-internet game usage, or alternatively Internet Gaming Disorder, presents a condition that, despite the potential utility of the underlying technology, augurs an assemblage of poor health and well-being, psychiatric liability and psychosocial perturbation with concomitant regional brain disturbance accompanied by incremental and inexorable prerequisites for appropriate interventions and eventual prevention. The tendency within the pathological expressions of disorder is for vulnerability to reside among the young, e.g., adolescents, rather than the older adults, over gender. Symptom-profiles of the condition incorporate varied, allconsuming and protracted problems ranging from cognitive-affective dysfunctions to biopsychological abnormalities such as sleep disturbances and fatigue. Escalating prevalence and epidemiological entanglement describe a putative framework of loneliness, introversion, neuroticism and impulsivity interspersed with expressions of depression, anxiety, sensation seeking, anger, a singular lack of assertiveness and the hazardous indications of ADHD propensity. Neurophysiological, brain regional and biomarker modifications underlying disorder pathophysiology appear more-or-less attuned to the symptomatic expressions of both diagnosed patients and those found to use excessive gaming, unconstrained from age-level: child, adolescent or young adult. Interventional strategies have centred upon the distinction of individual symptom-profiles, the description of withdrawal symptoms and related tolerance and the administration of coping strategies and resourceful behaviors, as for example implied by the “Craving Behavioral intervention”.