Tuesday, February 13, 2007; A14

Adoptive Parents May Try Harder

Adoptive parents invest more time and financial resources in their children than do biological parents, according to a national study challenging earlier research that has been used to oppose same-sex marriage and gay adoption.

The study, reported in the American Sociological Review, found that couples who adopt spend more money on their children and invest more time on such activities as reading to them, eating together and talking with them about their problems.

"One of the reasons adoptive parents invest more is that they really want children, and they go to extraordinary means to have them," Indiana University sociologist Brian Powell, one of the study's three co-authors, said yesterday.

Powell and his colleagues examined data from 13,000 households with first-graders in the family, focusing on 161 families headed by two adoptive parents. They rated better overall than families with biological parents on an array of criteria -- including helping with homework, parental involvement in school, exposure to cultural activities and family attendance at religious services. The only category in which adoptive parents fared worse was the frequency of talking with parents of other children.

The proportion of black and Hispanic Americans who get checked for colorectal cancer is about half that of whites, a study found, indicating that some groups are not getting the message about the importance of screening.

Researchers at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, studying Medicare patients, reported in the Archives of Internal Medicine that 9.7 percent of blacks and 8.1 percent of Hispanics had been screened for colorectal cancer -- compared with 19.3 percent of whites. Colorectal cancer is the second-deadliest form of cancer, causing more than 50,000 deaths a year in the United States.

"Despite good data that screening is good for preventing colon cancer, the message hasn't been stressed enough," said Ashwin Ananthakrishnan, who led the study.

The study examined data from almost 600,000 people in Florida, Illinois and New York who varied in age, ethnicity and economic status.

Parkinson's disease victims who become compulsive gamblers as a result of their drug treatment share some common traits, including age and alcohol use, a study said yesterday. The finding, if confirmed, may help doctors identify which patients are at high risk for the drug side effect, the report in the Archives of Neurology said.

Compulsive gambling is one of several well-documented reactions to dopamine drugs, which are used to treat Parkinson's. Others are hypersexuality, compulsive shopping and binge eating.

The study from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda looked at 63 Parkinson's patients, 21 with pathological gambling habits after taking dopamine drugs and 42 others who did not develop the reaction after using the drugs.

They were checked at a clinic in Toronto between June 2003 and October 2005.

The gamblers were likely to be younger when they developed the disease, have a family or personal history involving alcohol abuse and have a personality trait called novelty seeking -- meaning they tended to be impulsive, quick-tempered and easily bored, among other things.

-- From News Services