There remains a controversy among mental health experts in regards to hypersexuality, otherwise known as sexual addiction. Many professional are questioning whether or not is it a real mental disorder. The recent updates made to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual or Mental Disorders didn’t include anything in regards to sexual addiction. However, this type of addiction is still said to be the reason for a lot of ruined relationships, careers and lives.

For the first time ever, researchers at UCLA have taken measurements of how the brain acts in individuals believed to have the condition due to their inability to control their viewing of sexually based images. The study found that the brain responses recorded in these individuals was not related to the severity of their hypersexuality, but instead related to their level of sexual desire.

This means hypersexuality did not explain brain differences during sexual responses any more than having a high sex drive, according to senior author Nicole Prause, a researcher in the department of psychiatry at UCLA’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior.

“Potentially, this is an important finding,” Prause said. “It is the first time scientists have studied the brain responses specifically of people who identify as having hypersexual problems.”

The diagnosis of hypersexuality is typically associated with individuals who have sexual urges that they feel are out of control, engage in frequent sexual behavior, have suffered consequences from their actions such as divorce and economic hardship, and struggle reducing those types of behaviors.

Prause and her colleagues say that these types of behaviors are not always representative of an addiction. Non-pathological, high sexual desire could also be a good explanation for these same problems.

The study included 52 volunteers, 39 men and 13 women, between the ages of 18 and 39 who reported having problems controlling their urges to to view sexual images. They each filled out four different questionnaires that covered various topics like sexual behavior, sexual desire, sexual compulsions and possible negative outcomes from sexual behavior. Each participants scores were comparable to individuals actively seeking help for hypersexual issues.

While participants viewed the sexual images, they were monitored by EEG. An EEG measures a person’s brain waves. Researchers focused specifically on event related responses, which is how the brain reacted during a specific situation.

The researchers were expecting the p300 responses to the images to correspond to a person’s level of sexual desire. The p300 response is how the brain reacts 300 milliseconds after viewing an image. However, what they found was that the response is not related to hypersexual measurements at all.

Debate still continues over whether or not hypersexuality is an addiction or not.

The study appears in the most recent online issue of the journal Socioaffective Neuroscience and Psychology.