Chicago - Addiction experts speaking at the American Medical Association's (AMA) annual meeting said more study is needed on excessive video game playing, and strongly opposed a controversial proposal to designate video game addiction as a mental disorder, Reuters reported.

An AMA committee had initially proposed adding game addiction -- which is thought to affect an estimated 10% of players -- to a manual used by the American Psychiatric Association to diagnose mental disorders, but later retreated from that position and said the issue should be considered when the next version of the manual is published in 2012.

"There is nothing here to suggest that this is a complex physiological disease state akin to alcoholism or other substance abuse disorders, and it doesn't get to have the word addiction attached to it," Dr. Stuart Gitlow, of the American Society of Addiction Medicine and Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, told Reuters.

"It's not necessarily a cause-and-effect type issue. There may be certain kids who have a compulsive component to what they are doing," Dr. Louis Kraus, of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, told Reuters.

The AMA will vote on the matter later this week.

Related Links:
http://tinyurl.com/38tatr (Reuters)

http://www.ama-assn.org