BERLIN – Internet addiction and drug addiction do not, as it turns out, go together like ham and eggs. It’s more like oil and water.
Indeed, Internet addiction proved rare among former opiate addicts in methadone maintenance treatment clinics, both in Las Vegas and Tel Aviv, Einat Peles, Ph.D., reported at the annual congress of the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology.
Bruce Jancin/Frontline Medical News
This finding was unexpected, because it’s known that drug addicts are predisposed to other addictive behaviors. For example, in a previous study, Dr. Peles and her coinvestigators documented a strong association between participation in methadone maintenance treatment and pathological gambling (Am. J. Orthopsychiatry 2010;80:311-6).
In the new Internet addiction study, she reported on 177 unselected patients from a Las Vegas methadone maintenance clinic and 71 others from a similar clinic in Tel Aviv. All were assessed using the Internet Addiction Test questionnaire. They also were evaluated for depression using the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D), since Internet addiction has been shown in a meta-analysis to be related to depression (Psychopathology 2013;46:1-13), noted Dr. Peles of the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center.
None of the 248 study participants met the criteria for Internet addiction as defined by an Internet Addiction Test score of 80 or higher. Six patients – three from each clinic – were defined on the basis of a score of 50-79 on the 20-item questionnaire as having an occasional or frequent problems attributable to Internet use. And 23% of the Las Vegas cohort and 48% from Tel Aviv weren’t exposed to the Internet at all.
The unexpected rarity of Internet addiction among former opiate addicts in methadone treatment was consistent across the two clinics, even though the patient populations in the two cities were quite dissimilar. The Las Vegas patients were 36-fold more likely to be cannabis abusers and five times more likely to be women. They also were older, better educated, and more likely to be depressed than the Tel Aviv group.
After considerable debate, Internet addiction was not included as a recognized disorder in DSM-5.
The study was conducted free of commercial support. Dr. Peles reported having no financial conflicts regarding her study.