An international group of health experts concluded that existing regulations globally are insufficient to protect the public from the potential harms of widely accessible gambling.

The rise of online betting has led the commercial gambling industry to balloon worldwide, posing a significant threat to public health, according to a new report.

The report, published Thursday, comes from a public health commission on gambling convened by the medical journal The Lancet. The commission’s 22 members — academic experts from a dozen countries — reviewed existing studies and surveys on gambling’s prevalence, impacts and harms and determined that on a global scale, current regulations do not go far enough to protect the public and need to be strengthened.

“We’re not talking about people playing a game with cards around the table anymore,” said the commission’s epidemiology lead, Louisa Degenhardt, a professor at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. “Many people might be really experiencing harms from gambling — we think that it’s probably around 72 million people globally. That number is likely to increase, as we are seeing the increase in commercial organizations targeting people to gamble more.”