People addicted to sex show evidence of brain patterns similar to people who are addicted to drugs, British and U.S. researchers say.
In an experiment looking to find evidence for the somewhat controversial assertion that people can develop an addiction to sexual behaviors, researchers at the University of Cambridge recorded brain scans of two groups of men as they watched pornographic videos.
One group included men who had reported compulsive sex behaviors and another group was of men who said they didn't have such compulsions.
The scans of the compulsive group showed heightened activity in the identical brain reward centers that are activated during drug usage by drug addicts, they found.
There has been intense debate about whether compulsive sexual behaviors, also termed hypersexuality, should be classified as a recognized mental health disorder.
People with sexual compulsions exhibit behaviors comparable to those seen in people with drug addictions, the researchers said, and the experiment was designed to determine if there was comparable brain activity as well.
"There's a large literature that developed over the past three or four decades of how individuals respond to drug abuse, and we wanted to examine within that framework whether we see similarities and differences [to compulsive sexual behavior]," study co-author Dr. Marc Potenza, a psychiatrist at the Yale School of Medicine, said.
The brain scans showed activity in areas previous studies have associated with drug addiction; the amygdala, the ventral striatum and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex.
All three of those brain regions have been lined to feeling of motivation and reward, and to emotion processing and drug cravings, the researchers said.
"Studies like [this one] may be seen as another step towards our understanding [of] the similarities between excessive engagement in sex and excessive engagement in drug abuse," Potenza said.
The study finding will hopefully add to what is up to now a very limited amount of research into sex addiction and perhaps inspire more studies, study lead author Valerie Voon of Cambridge University says.
"It's not that the disorder doesn't exist; it's more that there are not enough studies to classify it and categorize it," she says. "I think that's the key role behind some of these studies. In order for disorders to be recognized, they need more studies in multiple realms ...like this current one."
The American Psychological Association's handbook of mental health disorders, the DSM-5, currently does not recognize sexual addiction as a mental disorder.
"Being able to study it from a neuroscience standpoint allows us to understand it more, but it [also] allows us to highlight that we should be recognizing it is a disorder," Voon says.
