This chapter reviews current research related to prevention, early interventions, and treatment strategies for "food addiction." However, the paucity of directly relevant investigation resulted in the necessity to broaden the focus to include studies in the area of general addiction disorders, and those targeting compulsive overeating and chronic weight gain. Included are discussions of school-based interventions aimed at reducing caloric intake, such as taxation on sweetened-beverage consumption, and the increased availability of fruits and vegetables in cafeteria menus. Consideration is also extended to discussions about the efficacy of public health policies and regulatory agencies aimed at reducing consumption of highly caloric foods at the population level – based on evidence of their addictive properties. This approach is based on past evidence that increasing prices and decreasing ease of access has reduced use of other addictive substances such as nicotine. Applied to addictive foods, this may indicate that implementing taxes on foods such as sugary candy and soda may aid in reducing consumption. Regarding treatment, although more focused research is still needed, perhaps the most promising evidence-based strategies occur in the field of cognitive interventions, which target hedonic overeating. These approaches are mostly theory driven and mesh with an experimental-medicine approach toward intervention development. It was also concluded that future research should carefully assess possible moderating effects of prevention/intervention and treatment approaches, including individual differences in sex/gender, personality traits such as impulsivity, and varying patterns of compulsive overeating. In addition, it would behoove future researchers to include standardized control groups in order to understand better the theoretical bases on which the interventions and treatments have been developed.

This chapter provides a brief overview of gaming disorder (GD) and its treatment. There are now over twenty different screens for assessing problematic gaming although relatively few have used nationally representative samples. The prevalence rates in these nationally representative studies have ranged from 1.2 percent to 8.5 percent depending upon country and screening instrument used. There have been a number of studies describing treatment of GD, although many of these tend not to distinguish between Internet Use Disorder and GD. In terms of treatment for GD, both psychological and pharmacological approaches have been adopted. More specifically, psychological treatment using a cognitive-behavioral framework (CBT) appears to be the most widely used. Furthermore, pharmacological treatment using opioid receptor antagonists, antidepressants, antipsychotics, opioid receptor antagonists, and psychostimulants has been reported in the literature. It is concluded that standardized and comprehensive methods of diagnosis are at present lacking, and that further research into GD is needed from clinical, epidemiological, cross-cultural, and neurobiological perspectives of GD.

This chapter provides the reader with a detailed background and approach to children and families with pre-operative anxiety. The risk factors associated with parental and patient anxiety are reviewed before the reader is provided methods for pharmacologic and non-pharmacologic strategies for anxiolysis. Each of the anxiolytics commonly used in pediatrics are reviewed.