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Video Games a Viable Treatment for Mental Illness?

Megan Brooks November 08, 2013
Playing a video game causes positive structural brain changes in regions responsible for spatial orientation, memory
formation, strategic planning, and fine motor skills, with potential implications for psychiatric disorders, new research
suggests.

In light of these findings, investigators from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany, suggest
that video game training might be therapeutically useful for patients with mental disorders such as schizophrenia,
post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), or neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's dementia, in which brain regions
are altered or reduced in size.

"While previous studies have shown differences in brain structure of video gamers, the present study can demonstrate the
direct causal link between video gaming and a volumetric brain increase. This proves that specific brain regions can be
trained by means of video games," lead author Simone Khn, PhD, said in a statement.

The study was published online October 29 in Molecular Psychiatry.

Commercially Available Game

Video gaming provides the gamer with a multitude of complex cognitive and motor demands. There is a growing body of
evidence that video game experts outperform novices on several cognitive measures of attention and perception, which has
fueled interest in using video games for brain training.

"Surprisingly," however, "studies exploring the functional and structural neural correlates of frequent video gaming are
scarce," the investigators write.

"This is the first study that systematically explores structural brain changes in response to training with a commercial video
game," Dr. Khn told Medscape Medical News.

The researchers had 23 healthy young adults with little or no prior video game experience play the
video game "Super Mario 64" for more than 30 minutes a day for 2 months. A matched control
group of 25 adults did not play video games. Brain volume was quantified using magnetic
resonance imaging (MRI).

In comparison with the control group, the video gaming group showed significant gray matter
increases in right hippocampal formation (HC), right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), and
bilateral cerebellum. These changes were more pronounced the more desire the video gamer had
to play the video game.

The researchers plan to do further studies to investigate the effects of video gaming in patients with
mental health issues.

"We are currently testing the effectiveness of the same intervention in patients with post-traumatic stress disorder, since they
have a deficit in hippocampal structure," Dr. Khn said.

"Many patients will accept video games more readily than other medical interventions," Jrgen Gallinat, MD, a coauthor of
the study from Charit University Medicine, St. Hedwig-Krankenhaus, in Berlin, commented in a statement.

"Remarkable" Impact

This is "pretty interesting work from an excellent group of researchers," Joaquin Anguera, PhD, of the Sandler
Neurosciences Center, University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the study, told Medscape Medical

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News. "I think it's clear that video games can have an influence on the brain, with this study providing that much more
evidence from a structural perspective."

Dr. Anguera said the changes at the DLPFC were "pretty remarkable given that this was associated with an off-the-shelf
game with little researcher supervision during training. Similarly, the observed DLPFC/desire correlation is also intriguing for
future work looking to capitalize on the use of video games as an intervention, as these findings would suggest that
identifying those individuals who were excited about playing would appear to have the potential for the greatest gains," he
said.

As reported by Medscape Medical News, in his own research, Dr. Anguera has also found cognitive benefits of video game
training.

The authors and Dr. Anguera report no relevant financial relationships.

Mol Psychiatry. Published online October 29, 2013. Abstract

Medscape Medical News 2013 WebMD, LLC

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Cite this article: Video Games a Viable Treatment for Mental Illness? Medscape. Nov 08, 2013.

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