ABSTRACT
Pathological gambling is an impulse control disorder characterized by lack of control over gambling, tolerance to amounts wagered, and forgoing other activities to gamble (1). The lifetime prevalence rate of this disorder is about 1.6%, and the past year prevalence rate is about 1.1% (2). The terms “problem gambling,” “transitional gambling,” and “atrisk gambling” are used to describe a pattern of gambling that causes some harm to the individual, but not enough to diagnose the person with pathological gambling. For the purposes of this chapter, we will refer to sub-threshold gambling as “problem gambling,” and the term “disordered gambling” will be used to refer to samples that contain both problem and pathological gamblers. The lifetime prevalence rate of problem gambling is about 3.9%, and the past-year rate is about 2.8% (2). Thus, slightly over 5% of the population experiences disordered gambling at some point in their lives.
