(Press-News.org) WACO, Texas (July 2, 2012) - Methamphetamine abuse leads to an increase in child abuse and neglect, which causes an increase in foster care admissions, according to a study from Baylor University.
The study, published online in the journal Economic Inquiry, found that a 1 percent increase in meth use led to a 1.5 percent increase in foster care admissions. It is the first study to provide evidence for meth abuse's causal effect on foster home admissions.
Follow this link to read the entire study: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1465-7295.2012.00481.x/full
"Our findings suggest strongly that the social costs of parental meth use include child maltreatment and growth in foster care placements," said Scott Cunningham, Ph.D., study co-author and assistant professor of economics at Baylor University's Hankamer School of Business. "To address this, child welfare policies should be designed specifically for the children of meth-using parents."
To measure the effect of meth use on foster care admissions, Cunningham and co-author Keith Finlay, Ph.D., assistant professor of economics at Tulane University, collected monthly data on foster care admissions and exits, meth drug treatment admissions, retail meth prices, and a variety of other potentially relevant factors from January 1995 to December 1999.
The study centered on federal laws that severely restricted two key ingredients used to produce methamphetamine: ephedrine, which was restricted in 1995, and pseudoephedrine, which was restricted in 1997.
"The consequence of each policy was to cause a temporary scarcity of methamphetamine in the market, driving prices up and purity down," Cunningham said.
The 1995 restriction caused a dramatic spike in meth prices, but the effect was relatively short lived. After six months, prices returned to their pre-restriction level. The 1997 regulation had a smaller but more sustained effect on prices—lasting approximately a year.
"Public health professionals have observed these large social costs of methamphetamine production and use," Finlay said. "Our paper is one of the first to provide plausible causal evidence of these effects that are not borne by users but by children."
The study used foster care enrollment data from the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS), a federally mandated database that aggregates detailed case information on each child in foster care and each child who has been adopted under the authority of all state child welfare agencies. AFCARS also indicates whether a child was removed as a result of neglect, physical abuse, parental drug use or parental incarceration.
The U.S. foster care population increased from approximately 280,000 to 408,000—a rise of over 45 percent due primarily to increased admissions in the 1980s and 1990s. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, from 1986 to 2010, there was a stark increase in the foster care population from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s caused by a rapid growth in entry with no associated uptick in exit.
From August 1995 to December 1995, white meth treatment self- admissions fell 26.5 percent due to the 1995 ephedrine regulation. The drop was temporary since drug producers substituted pseudoephedrine and meth self-admissions grew 25.6 percent from December 1995 to February 1998. That growth caused 2,257 children to enter foster care, according to the researchers.
"Given the large social costs of meth use on child maltreatment, policymakers face a significant challenge to reduce its use," Cunningham said. "Regions with intensive meth use should consider greater resources for meth treatment and child welfare services. These areas have historically been rural or exurban and so may already be underserved. Our study also highlights the social benefits of policies restricting consumer access to methamphetamine ingredients, like pseudoephedrine."
INFORMATION:
ABOUT BAYLOR UNIVERSITY
Baylor University is a private Christian university and a nationally ranked research institution, characterized as having "high research activity" by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The university provides a vibrant campus community for approximately 15,000 students by blending interdisciplinary research with an international reputation for educational excellence and a faculty commitment to teaching and scholarship. Chartered in 1845 by the Republic of Texas through the efforts of Baptist pioneers, Baylor is the oldest continually operating university in Texas. Located in Waco, Baylor welcomes students from all 50 states and more than 80 countries to study a broad range of degrees among its 11 nationally recognized academic divisions. Baylor sponsors 19 varsity athletic teams and is a founding member of the Big 12 Conference.
ABOUT HANKAMER SCHOOL OF BUSINESS
Baylor University's Hankamer School of Business provides a rigorous academic experience, consisting of classroom and hands-on learning, guided by Christian commitment and a global perspective. Recognized nationally for several programs, including Entrepreneurship and Accounting, the school offers 24 undergraduate and 13 graduate areas of study. Visit www.baylor.edu/business and follow on Twitter at twitter.com/Baylor_Business.
END
(Boston) – A study conducted at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) demonstrates an effective combination therapy for breast cancer cells in vitro. The findings, published in the July 2012 issue of Anticancer Research, raise the possibility of using this type of combination therapy for different forms of breast cancer, including those that develop resistance to chemotherapy and other treatments.
The study was led by researchers at the Boston University Cancer Center. Sibaji Sarkar, PhD, adjunct instructor of medicine at BUSM, is the study's corresponding author. ...
Research suggests that patients with leukemia sometimes relapse because standard chemotherapy fails to kill the self-renewing leukemia initiating cells, often referred to as cancer stem cells. In such cancers, the cells lie dormant for a time, only to later begin cloning, resulting in a return and metastasis of the disease.
One such type of cancer is called pediatric T cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia, or T-ALL, often found in children, who have few treatment options beyond chemotherapy.
A team of researchers – led by Catriona H. M. Jamieson, MD, PhD, associate professor ...
Compared to the average three year life span of a common rat, the 10 to 30 year life of the naked mole rat, a subterranean rodent native to East Africa, is impressive. And compared to the human body, the body of this rodent shows little decline due to aging, maintaining high activity, bone health, reproductive capacity, and cognitive ability throughout its lifetime. Now a collaborative of researchers in Israel and the United States is working to uncover the secret to the small mammal's long — and active — lifespan.
Dr. Dorothee Huchon of Tel Aviv University's Department ...
Every second, around 25 million cell divisions take place in our bodies. This process is driven by microtubule filaments which continually grow and shrink. A new study shows how so-called motor proteins in the cytosol can control their dynamics.
The cytoskeleton plays a central role in the process of cell division. It is composed in large part of protein filaments known as microtubules, which also help determine the size, shape and mobility of a cell. In a new study, LMU biophysicist Erwin Frey and his colleagues Anna Melbinger and Louis Reese have used a theoretical ...
Heart attacks during pregnancy are uncommon, but the prevalence of heart disease in pregnant mothers has increased over the past decade as more women delay pregnancy until they are older. These women, who are generally less physically active than their younger peers, tend to have higher cholesterol levels and are at greater risk of heart disease and diabetes.
While research has shown that the heart typically functions better during pregnancy due to a rise in cardiac pumping capacity to meet increased demands, a new UCLA study in rats and mice demonstrates that heart ...
WASHINGTON – Researchers have identified genetic markers that may influence whether a person finishes high school and goes on to college, according to a national longitudinal study of thousands of young Americans. The study is in the July issue of Developmental Psychology, a publication of the American Psychological Association.
"Being able to show that specific genes are related in any way to academic achievement is a big step forward in understanding the developmental pathways among young people," said the study's lead author, Kevin Beaver, PhD, a professor at the ...
Women in countries with great gender inequality are more likely than men to support authoritarian values, according to a new study of 54 countries. The shift away from beliefs in independence and freedom is the result, social psychologists say, of authoritarianism helping such women cope with a threatening environment.
"If a person is authoritarian, they are more likely to follow what group leaders ask them to do, and to follow the crowd more generally," says Mark Brandt of DePaul University in Chicago, a co-author of the paper just published online in Personality and ...
Shoes, cars, airplanes, rotor blades for wind turbines, self-adhesive notes, plasters – this is just a sample of the many products featuring adhesives. More than 820,000 tons of adhesive were produced in Germany in 2010, according to the German Adhesives Association – Industrieverband Klebstoffe. To this day the majority of adhesives are manufactured from petroleum-based materials. Only gradually is the industry also offering adhesives made from renewable raw materials such as starch, cellulose, dextrins, and proteins. Pioneering products featuring these new adhesives include ...
CINCINNATI—Researchers at the University of Cincinnati (UC) Hoxworth Blood Center have discovered a new gene target for leukemia therapy.
These findings, slated for the July 26, 2012 print issue of Blood, the journal of the American Society of Hematology, could lead to cellular targets for a patient population that otherwise may not have desirable outcomes and could potentially stop the onset of leukemia before it begins.
A team led by Jose Cancelas, MD, PhD, an associate professor of pediatrics at the UC College of Medicine and director of the research division at ...
The use of compact laser accelerators for cancer therapy with charged particles such as protons could become possible in the future if scientists succeed in generating protons with very high energies. Physicists at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) directed the light of the high power laser DRACO perpendicularly and obliquely onto a thin metal foil; thus, permitting them to demonstrate for the first time that accelerated protons follow the direction of the laser light. By incorporating this new data into a conventional model describing the laser particle acceleration, ...
