Patients with sexual addiction and patients with gambling disorder share some psychopathologic features and sociodemographic traits that are not found in healthy control subjects, a study showed.
This finding supports the argument that sexual addiction “should be classified more closely to other behavioral addictions such as gambling disorder,” said Dr. Josep M. Farré of Hospital Universitari Quirón-Dexeus, Barcelona, and his associates.
However, patients with sexual addiction are different from those with gambling disorder in their personality traits, particularly with regard to responses to novelty. Both of these disorders “could benefit from ‘transdiagnostic’ treatment programs aimed to improve the character trait ‘self-directedness,’ since it is a factor associated with various personality disorders related to behavioral addictions,” the investigators said (Compr. Psychiatry 2015;56:59-68).
In what they described as the first study to examine the similarities and differences among these two clinical groups and healthy controls, Dr. Farré and his associates assessed during an 8-year period 59 patients seeking treatment for sexual addiction, 2,190 in treatment for gambling disorder, and 93 healthy volunteers who resided in the same geographical area as the clinical participants.
The mean age of the study participants was 42 years. Most (90%) were men, and approximately half were married or living with a partner.
All the study participants underwent a comprehensive battery of evaluations in face-to-face clinical interviews to measure sociodemographic characteristics, general psychopathology, personality traits, and gambling and sex behaviors.
Patients with sexual addiction had scores on all the scales of the Symptom Check List–90 Items–Revised (SCL-90-R) that were very similar to those of patients with gambling disorder, and both groups had significantly different scores from the control subjects. The two patient groups were very similar for somatization, obsession-compulsion, interpersonal sensitivity, depression, anxiety, hostility, phobic anxiety, paranoid ideation, and psychoticism. They also showed similar symptom intensity and similar overall levels of psychological distress.
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