A study published by the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences on Wednesday has found a sharp rise in emergency department visits linked to gambling disorders in Ontario, and it is mainly due to the growth of online betting and single-event sports wagering.
Key Takeaways
- Researchers tracked hospital data over a 14-year period, ending in 2025.
- Males aged 10 to 29 saw visits increase 154%, while men aged 30 to 44 rose 116%.
- Many gambling-related emergency patients also experienced substance use, mental health conditions or suicidal thoughts.
Researchers tracked hospital data over a 14-year period, ending in 2025. They logged 757 individuals, aged from 10 to 105, who made a combined 952 emergency department visits related to gambling disorders over that span.
The increase was most pronounced among young men and boys. By the end of the study period, visits rose 154% among males between 10 and 29 years old, and 116% among men aged 30 to 44. Researchers found no notable increase among females in either age group.
Canada legalized single-event sports betting in August 2021. In April 2022, Ontario online casinos were introduced when online gambling was expanded to private companies.
Ryan Forrest, a public health doctoral student at the University of Toronto who co-authored the study, said the numbers likely represent only a fraction of those affected. Forrest noted that many people experience harm from gambling without ever reaching the point of seeking emergency care.
Many patients who arrived at emergency departments for gambling-related crises also had co-occurring substance use or mental health conditions, including suicidal thoughts, according to Daniel Myran, a physician and associate professor at the University of Toronto who worked on the research.
Forrest said she hopes the findings, along with other recent research, push provinces and territories to reconsider how quickly they have expanded legal access to online betting and single-event sports wagering in recent years.
Enjoying Covers content? Add us as a preferred source on your Google account
What Alberta researchers are watching for
The emergency room findings add to a growing body of research on gambling-related harm tied to the expansion of online betting markets, a trend now drawing close attention in Alberta.
Carrie Shaw, chair of the Alberta Gambling Research Institute at the University of Alberta, said she expects Alberta to see gambling patterns similar to those documented in Ontario. Alberta became the second Canadian province to open a regulated online gambling market when it launched in July of this year.
Shaw pointed to a separate survey from Ontario's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health showing a 50% jump in teen online gambling over a two-year period. She said there is little reason to expect a different outcome in Alberta given the similarities in market structure and advertising.
"There is nothing that would suggest that we won't experience the same thing," Shaw said, adding that comparable open markets and comparable advertising should be expected to produce comparable results.
Shaw did note one advantage in Alberta's approach. The province uses a centralized self-exclusion system covering both land-based and online gambling. She said that structure improves on Ontario's system, where self-exclusion timers differ from platform to platform, making it harder for people to fully remove themselves from all forms of betting at once.
