GAMBLING (L CLARK, SECTION EDITOR) Brain Imaging in Gambling Disorder

# The Author(s) 2015. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Abstract Gambling disorder recently was reclassified under the category Bsubstance-related and addictive disorders.^With regard to the diagnostic criteria, it overlaps a great deal with substance use disorder, i.e., loss of control, craving/withdraw-al, and neglect of other areas of life. However, the gambling disorder symptom Bchasing one’s losses ^ is the only criterion absent from substance use disorder. Therefore, special forms of reward (i.e., gain/loss) processing, such as the processing of loss avoidance and loss aversion, have just recently attracted attention among gambling disorder researchers. Because gam-bling disorder might be considered an addiction in its Bpure^ form, i.e., without the influence of a drug of abuse, investigat-ing brain volume changes in people with this behavioral ad-diction is an important task for neuroimaging researchers in exploring the neural signatures of addiction. Because the brain is a complex network, investigation of alterations in functional connectivity has gained interest among gambling disorder re-searchers in order to get a more complete picture of functional brain changes in people with gambling disorder. However, only a few studies on brain structure and functional connectiv-ity in gambling disorder have been performed so far. This review focuses on brain imaging studies of reward and loss processing, with an emphasis on loss avoidance and aversion as well as brain volume and functional connectivity in gam-bling disorder