Study suggests even a moderate gambling habit is linked to increased mortality and other bad stuff

[Klaralven]

Banking data from 6.5 million individuals over six years is providing evidence that even moderate gambling can be associated with financial distress, negative lifestyles, and an increased likelihood of death.

Research published in Nature Human Behaviour showed gambling is found alongside higher rates of future unemployment and physical disability and, at the highest levels, with substantially increased mortality.

...

Muggleton, now a research fellow at Oxford University, extracted the data from the bank's Teradata data warehouse using the SQL Assistant and performed the statistical analysis in R (those interested can have a poke around the scripts used here, though all commercially sensitive code has been redacted).

...

The researchers identified gambling transactions by relying the pre-existing category in the bank's typography of transactions, which includes various forms of gambling such as offline and online bookmakers, casinos, lotteries and other providers.

It did not cover cash gambling transactions, or electronic transactions using third-party payment processors and as such might provide a conservative estimate. The study also included pre-existing markers for spending associated with health and lifestyle.

...

Using a new approach, the study reveals some worrying trends with the top 10 per cent of gamblers spending more than £1,800 a year, nearly 8 per cent of their total spending. But it was evidence in the long tail of gamblers that struck the researchers.

"Traditionally we've thought that there is a small pot of individuals who are labelled as 'problem gamblers' and there's harm there, and for the vast majority of people there's no harm associated with gambling," Muggleton said. "But what we find here is that there's more of a continuum. We find that harm is associated with gambling and even [at] quite low levels. Rather than seeing the sort of two camps of gamblers, it looks as though there is a more of a kind of a gradient, which is something that I don't think we necessarily knew before we did the analysis but it was something that emerged from it."

https://www.theregister.com/2021/02/05/big_data_banking_study_reveals/

Risk takers die younger?

[634-5789]

1. I got 3-5 that this info is wrong.

[lagomorph777]

4. I'll take that.

Actually, no I won't. I spent a dollar once, when I was in Vegas on business. That was 30 years ago. Blech.

[Midnight Writer]

2. Right. I see gambling as a symptom rather than a cause of self destructive behavior.

[Klaralven]

3. Besides being risk taking, they would be irrational and innumerate.