Citation

Lahey BB, Goodman SH, Waldman ID, Bird H, Canino G, Jensen P, Regier D, Leaf PJ, Gordon R, Applegate B. J. Abnorm. Child Psychol. 1999; 27(4): 247-260.

Affiliation

Department of Psychiatry, University of Chicago, and National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA. blahey@yoda.bsd.uchicago.edu

Copyright

(Copyright © 1999, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

10503644

Abstract

In a cross-sectional household sample of 9-through 17-year-old youths from 4 U.S. communities, youths with earlier ages of onset of conduct problems engaged in more conduct problems than youths with later ages of onset when current age and gender were controlled. Specifically, youths with earlier ages of onset were more likely to engage in several types of physical aggression, frequent lying, theft, and vandalism and were less likely to engage in only truancy. There also was an inverse relation between age of onset and level of functional impairment, mental health service use, and meeting diagnostic criteria for conduct disorder, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and oppositional defiant disorder. Within the limits of cross-sectional data, these results support the hypothesis that key aspects of the heterogeneity of conduct problems among youths are related to the age of onset of conduct problems.

Language: en