Conduct problems and head injuries across development: investigating longitudinal symptom interplay and common neural correlates

Abstract

Conduct problems and childhood head injuries are associated with a wide range of maladaptive outcomes. With emerging evidence suggesting a bidirectional association between the two, further investigation of their longitudinal interplay is warranted. In Paper 1, their linked developmental pathways were explored using latent class analysis on children enrolled in the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS). Results showed that known trajectories of conduct problems (i.e., childhood-limited, persistent, and adolescent-onset) appeared to have distinct linked pathways of head injury. Additionally, cumulative risk at the child, mother, and household levels as well as ADHD and negative maternal parenting were all strongly associated with membership to these clinically relevant linked pathways. Paper 2 elaborated from these findings to investigate whether their co-occurrence had a greater impact on adolescent delinquency compared to their isolated occurrence. Using MCS data, results from negative binomial regression models identified that, indeed, children with a history of co-occurring conduct problems and head injury until age 11 had significantly greater rates of adolescent delinquency at age 14 compared to children with a history of either in isolation or a history of neither. Paper 3 then explored whether neural mechanisms of reward processing were disrupted more so in children with co-occurring conduct disorder and mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) compared to their isolated occurrence. From utilising data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study, results showed that their co-occurrence was associated with increased left amygdala and hippocampus activation during receipt of a monetary reward compared to those with either in isolation or typically developing controls. This suggests that children with co-occurring conduct disorder and a mTBI may have a stronger encoding of emotionally salient reward such as monetary gain, which could drive future goal-directed behaviour in pursuit of further reward.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Hannah Rae Carr: orcid.org/0000-0001-8348-7325

ORCID for Valerie Brandt: orcid.org/0000-0002-3208-2659

ORCID for James Hall: orcid.org/0000-0001-8002-0922

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