Sexual Differences in Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD): From Psychological Features to Neuroanatomical Networks

Abstract

Internet gaming disorder (IGD) has been included in the 2013 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) as a condition in need of further study, and gaming disorder was recognized by the World Health Organization as a mental disorder in the International Classification of Disease (ICD-11) of 2018. IGD has different characteristics in the two sexes and is more prevalent in males than females. However, even if the female gamer population is constantly growing, the majority of available studies analyzed only males, or the data were not analyzed by sex. To better elucidate sex differences in IGD, we selectively reviewed research publications that evaluated IGD separately for males and females collected in approximately one hundred publications over the past 20 years. The available data in this narrative review indicate that IGD is strongly dimorphic by sex for both its psychological features and the involvement of different brain areas. Impulsivity, low self-control, anxiety, emotion dysregulation, and depression are some of the psychological features associated with IGD that show a sex dimorphism. At the same time, IGD and its psychological alterations are strongly correlated to dimorphic functional characteristics in relevant brain areas, as evidenced by fMRI. More research is needed to better understand sex differences in IGD. Animal models could help to elucidate the neurological basis of this disorder.

Keywords: GD; IGD; gaming addiction; neuroanatomical regions; psychological factors; sexual dimorphism.

Figure 1

Internet gaming disorder prevalence in males and females. IGD prevalence (express as %) in a male and female general population obtained by the raw data provided in the study or by the average of these when the percentage of the prevalence of internet gaming addicted was extracted by sex in multiple studies. For the creation of this figure, only studies were used that analyzed males and females separately, in an age group between adolescence and adulthood.