The odds are high that if one of your parents is addicted to gambling, you may be too, a new study of Australian twins found.
Scientists have found that genes play a role in a number of addictions and gambling is no exception, the researchers said in their study published in the June issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry.
“Previous research in men showed that gambling addiction can run in the family,” researcher Wendy Slutske of the University of Missouri said. “This study extends those finding to include women.”
PHOTO: AFP
By studying identical and fraternal twins, Slutske and colleagues from the Queensland Institute of Medical Research in Brisbane were able to tease out the different impacts of genetic and environmental factors on addiction.
The team asked more than 2,700 women and 2,000 men from the Australian Twin Registry questions about their gambling, and also questioned their friends.
Almost all the study members gambled to some degree, but the men were twice as likely as women to be gambling addicts.
The authors concluded that in line with decades of genetic research, “shared environmental factors do not explain” variations in addictive behaviors although that is not to say that the environment plays no role, they argue.
“A perfect storm” of gambling addiction might occur for the child of a gambling addict who is “exposed to a problem gambling role model and inherits problem gambling susceptibility genes,” they wrote.
THE ‘MONSTER’: The Philippines on Saturday sent a vessel to confront a 12,000-tonne Chinese ship that had entered its exclusive economic zone The Philippines yesterday said it deployed a coast guard ship to challenge Chinese patrol boats attempting to “alter the existing status quo” of the disputed South China Sea. Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Commodore Jay Tarriela said Chinese patrol ships had this year come as close as 60 nautical miles (111km) west of the main Philippine island of Luzon. “Their goal is to normalize such deployments, and if these actions go unnoticed and unchallenged, it will enable them to alter the existing status quo,” he said in a statement. He later told reporters that Manila had deployed a coast guard ship to the area
A group of Uyghur men who were detained in Thailand more than one decade ago said that the Thai government is preparing to deport them to China, alarming activists and family members who say the men are at risk of abuse and torture if they are sent back. Forty-three Uyghur men held in Bangkok made a public appeal to halt what they called an imminent threat of deportation. “We could be imprisoned and we might even lose our lives,” the letter said. “We urgently appeal to all international organizations and countries concerned with human rights to intervene immediately to save us from
RISING TENSIONS: The nations’ three leaders discussed China’s ‘dangerous and unlawful behavior in the South China Sea,’ and agreed on the importance of continued coordination Japan, the Philippines and the US vowed to further deepen cooperation under a trilateral arrangement in the face of rising tensions in Asia’s waters, the three nations said following a call among their leaders. Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and outgoing US President Joe Biden met via videoconference on Monday morning. Marcos’ communications office said the leaders “agreed to enhance and deepen economic, maritime and technology cooperation.” The call followed a first-of-its-kind summit meeting of Marcos, Biden and then-Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida in Washington in April last year that led to a vow to uphold international
US president-elect Donald Trump is not typically known for his calm or reserve, but in a craftsman’s workshop in rural China he sits in divine contemplation. Cross-legged with his eyes half-closed in a pose evoking the Buddha, this porcelain version of the divisive US leader-in-waiting is the work of designer and sculptor Hong Jinshi (洪金世). The Zen-like figures — which Hong sells for between 999 and 20,000 yuan (US$136 to US$2,728) depending on their size — first went viral in 2021 on the e-commerce platform Taobao, attracting national headlines. Ahead of the real-estate magnate’s inauguration for a second term on Monday next week,
RSS