Children as young as 12 will be among the first patients to be treated on the NHS for gaming addiction.

Psychiatric staff from Central and North West London NHS trust have identified about half the potential patients, aged 12 to 20, whose addiction is so severe it has kept them off school, damaged their family relationships or isolated them from friends.

The team, led by Dr Henrietta Bowden-Jones, who founded the NHS's first national centre for problem gamblers, aims to recruit 15 in total for the pilot group, which will begin in September as a first step towards a national programme for gaming addiction.

They will be treated for free on the NHS with funds from Nottingham Trent University, a leading research centre on behavioural addiction, with the aim of creating a model for diagnosis and treatment to be applied across the UK.

"We'll record in depth everything we can in order to develop the largest database in the country to better understand the illness," said Dr Bowden-Jones. "They are different to gamblers or alcoholics. It's a younger generation. As it doesn't involve substances, the neurological processes will be different."