Adult outcomes of conduct problems in childhood or adolescence: further evidence of the societal burden of conduct problems

Excerpt

Conduct problems are common and costly to society, with recent studies documenting dramatically increased levels of adult service use in those with conduct problems in childhood [1]. Conduct problems have been found to predict a range of mental and physical health problems, and poorer educational, occupational, and interpersonal outcomes. They also place a substantial burden on the affected individuals, their families, and their local communities [2, 3]. There is broad agreement in the literature that conduct problems are highly heterogeneous in terms of their symptoms, aetiology, functional impact, and developmental course, and therefore, some way of parsing this heterogeneity by identifying meaningful subtypes is required. One prominent subtyping approach has been to classify conduct problems according to their age-of-onset—for example, the DSM-5 distinguishes between childhood-onset and adolescence-onset Conduct Disorder according to the presence or the absence of conduct problems prior to age 10 [4]. The availability of repeated-measures data from prospective longitudinal studies investigating the development of antisocial behaviour and advanced statistical methods for modelling group-based trajectories has led to a dramatic expansion in our knowledge regarding the developmental course of conduct problems. These methods have also enabled researchers to study the causes, correlates, and outcomes of different conduct problem trajectories. …