Just when you thought that pre-natal exposure to alcohol couldn't cause any more problems, comes this: A new study that suggests that it could predispose children to become alcoholics.

The new research comes courtesy of the State University of New York system, specifically its SUNY Upstate Developmental Exposure Alcohol Research Center in Syracuse. Steven Youngentob, a professor of neuroscience and physiology, and his team found that rats exposed to alcohol in the womb learn to like its taste and smell, and will drink more of it later on than rats who... more

If you have been around the world of Russian adoption for any amount of time, you have heard or read bleak assessments of what happens to the children who age out of its orphanages. Never having found a forever family in Russia or abroad, these young people often go out into the world ill-prepared for life on their own.

But last week, I was reminded in stark terms of the challenges they face. The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health released a study that was conducted to learn how many of the street youth in St. Petersburg were... more

Sign up for a Google alert on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and you get a lot of junk e-mail. FAS seems to be a favorite term for spam bloggers, of which there are many. So many, in fact, that many times I delete the alert on FAS without even reading it.

But when I do, I run the risk of missing key information for parents of children adopted from Russia, because of their concern about FAS in that country. If I had hit the delete key too fast this week I would have missed the research behind the... more

An international team of doctors has developed a way to use three-dimensional laser images to diagnose fetal alcohol syndrome.

The doctors used the lasers to take just six images of a child suspected of having FAS--two from the front and two from either side. That gave them digital images that could then be measured objectively by a computer program the researchers established to look for differences between a control group that did not have FAS and the child being measured.

Any parent who has adopted from Russia or who is thinking of adopting from Russia... more

Like many adoptive parents, I worry from time to time whether the poor pre-natal care and early nutrition that my kids received in Russia might have affected their brain development. I worry about whether impaired brain development might hamper their performance in school and restrict them in later life.

Maybe now I can stop worrying so much.

Today's New York Times carried a front page story about two astounding... more

Once upon a time in Russia, as in many countries, it was unseemly for women to drink and certainly to drink to excess. That began to change in the 1960s and, while it may not be possible to put the genie back in the bottle, some health professionals are working to educate Russian women and their doctors about the problems caused by drinking during pregnancy.

One of them is Tatiana Balachova, and I had a chance to interview her last week. Born and educated in Russia, Balachova is now an assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma, and... more

Tuberculosis is a serious disease and it has been around for a long time. But there are well-established ways to detect it and a range of drugs to treat it.

TB can be either latent, which isn't contagious, or active. A person must be in close contact with an infected person to become infected, which could potentially describe the conditions in a Russian orphanage. According to the Mayo Clinic, a woman with active TB can sometimes pass the disease to her fetus, but that is rare. In many cases, the body's own immune system defeats TB; that defeat can result in a positive TB test, but not... more

So imagine you're a journalist who has just reported that a study concluded that children who were adopted between 1986 and 2001 had a high rate of infection from tuberculosis. What would your next step be? If you answered ask whether the infection rate is still that high, you get a gold star. Unfortunately, the Canadian Press reporter behind the story in part one didn't.

Luckily, there is some good recent data to answer that question.

In March of this year, the World Health Organization released a report, "Global... more

The newsletter from the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute arrived in my e-mail late last week and it contained a scary headline: "TUBERCULOSIS INFECTIONS IN INTERNATIONAL ADOPTEES REPORTED RISING". According to the accompanying blurb, children from Russia had the second highest rate of infection. Wow. I immediately bookmarked it for a post this week.

And then, as I frequently tell my kids, there's the truth.

Let me say, before I get too far into this post, that I do not in any way mean to downplay the seriousness of tuberculosis.... more

Why does pre-natal exposure to alcohol seem to weigh more heavily on some of the children we have adopted from Russia than others? A new study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison may hold the key.

According to findings published Friday in Biological Psychiatry, the official journal of the Society of Biological Psychiatry, children who carry a certain gene variant may be more likely than others to suffer the ill effects... more