INTERNET ADDICTION TEST KIT

1. INTERNET ADDICTION DETECTION
TEST KIT: IS IT ALREADY
SCIENTIFICALLY FEASIBLE?
Milen Santiago Ramos MA, MSc, PhD
Clinical Psychology Neuroscience Criminology
PSYCHSERV,INC

2. A little bit of history
Kimberly Young's interest in Internet addiction started when the Internet was
proliferating in the 1990s. At that time, many people in mainstream media were
beginning to coin the phrase 'online addicts' for those who spent large amounts
of time on the Internet. In 1994 Young devised a questionnaire for Internet users
to see what their online behaviours had in common with the actions of
compulsive gamblers and alcoholics. Her Caught in the Net by John Wiley &
Sons was published in 1998
September 1999 scientists at the Yale School of Medicine were able to isolate
the long-lived protein, called Delta-FosB, and show that it triggered addiction
when released to a specific area of the brains of genetically engineered mice,
culprit of abuse being cocaine.
Donald L. Hilton, Jr and Clark Watts in 2011 had a discourse on the different
types of behavioral addiction like eating/obesity. sex/porgnography, gambling
and other natural addictions like internet addictions and tried to discuss it from
the neuroscience perspective, that the phenomenon of hypofrontality and
accumulation of delta FosB in the nucleus accumbens and other striatal salience
centers are something which cannot be ignored in this addiction cases
This year 2014, DSM-5, the American classification of psychiatric disorder
recognized the internet gaming disorder as a form of behavioral addiction

3. Delta fosb
FOSB or FosB is a protein that, in
humans, is encoded by the FOSB gene
The FOS gene family consists of 4
members: FOS, FOSB, FOSL1, and
FOSL2
the FOS proteins have been implicated as
regulators of cell proliferation,
differentiation, and transformation.
FosB has truncated splice variants ΔFosB
and (further truncated) Δ2ΔFosB

4. The ΔFosB splice variant has been
identified as playing a central, crucial (
necessary and sufficient role in the
development of many forms of behavioral
plasticity and neuroplasticity involved in
both behavioral addictions (associated with
natural rewards) and drug addictions
The ΔFosB splice variant has been
identified as playing a central, crucial (
necessary and sufficient role in the
development of many forms of behavioral
plasticity and neuroplasticity involved in
both behavioral addictions (associated with
natural rewards) and drug addictions

5. In the nucleus accumbens, ΔFosB
functions as a "molecular switch" and
"master control protein" in the development
of an addiction;[5][16][17]
in other words, once
"turned on" (sufficiently overexpressed)
ΔFosB triggers a series of transcription
events that ultimately result in addictive
behavior
A medical review from late 2014 argued
that accumbal ΔFosB expression can be
used as an addiction biomarker and
that the degree of accumbal ΔFosB
induction by a drug is a metric for how
addictive it is relative to others

6. current recent assay used
WESTERN BLOT
One of the most powerful methods for detecting a particular protein in a
complex mixture combines the superior resolving power of gel
electrophoresis, the specificity of antibodies, and the sensitivity of
enzyme assays. Called Western blotting, or immunoblotting, this three-
step procedure is commonly used to separate proteins and then identify
a specific protein of interest
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK21589/figure/A651/?report=objectonly

8. Fi
ane is washed to remove unbound Ab
1
. (c) In the development step, the membrane first is incubated with a second antibody (Ab
2
) that binds to the bound Ab
1
. This second antibody is covalently linked to alkaline phosphatase, which catalyzes a chromog
POSSIBLE PROBLEMS IN INTERNET
ADDICTION DETECTION
1) ANIMAL STUDIES/
POST MORTEM STUDIES
The challenge is its application in live
humans for treatment and prevention
purposes
2) PROBLEMS IN WESTERN BLOTS
Did you know that 41 percent of
researchers say their Western blots fail
at least 25 percent of the time?

9. Western Blot Applications for Medical
Diagnosis
HIV infection
Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (also
known as "mad cow disease“
Hepatitis B infection
Herpes simplex virus 1 and 2 (HSV-1 and
HSV-2

10. Thank you for listening