A Life Of Crime Takes A Toll On Health
April 16, 2007 – 3:51 pm | posted in Psychology / Psychiatry, Public HealthANTISOCIAL behaviour doesn’t just harm society it may also harm the perpetrators’ health. That’s the message of a 30-year study examining the hidden costs of petty crime to society.
The researchers, who monitored 500 children for 30 years, found that naughty boys who didn’t reform in adulthood suffered worse health than their peers, including many who were equally deprived in childhood. The researchers are now seeking a way of identifying those who are most likely to become persistent offenders, with a view to intervening before it is too late.
“It’s the first study to demonstrate the link between children who engage in antisocial behaviour and deficits in physical health when they grow up,” says study leader Candice Odgers of the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London. As well as accounting for more than their share of crime in later life, “they also incur hitherto unrecognised medical costs”, she says.
Odgers analysed data on more than 500 men in their early 30s from a range of socio-economic backgrounds in Dunedin, New Zealand. The results, published in Archives of General Psychiatry (vol 64, p 476), show that individuals whose bad behaviour began in childhood and persisted into adulthood were twice as likely to be infected with the herpes virus and three times as likely to suffer from chronic bronchitis or gum disease as those who never engaged in bad behaviour.
Although these individuals accounted for just 10 per cent of the sample, they were responsible for 18 per cent of traffic injuries, 29 per cent of the days spent in psychiatric hospitals, 72 per cent of the months spent in jail and 42 per cent of the total months where study members were homeless or taken in by others.
Persistent offenders also had three times the healthy blood level of C-reactive protein, a marker that indicates raised risk of heart attacks or stroke. It is surprising to see this marked risk for heart disease in such young men, Odgers says. “As we follow them to their 50s and 60s, the health burden will likely get even worse.”
Her analysis so far suggests that nurture plays a strong role in determining who is most likely to offend, and their subsequent health. For example, 40 per cent of persistent offenders came from families of low economic status, and 23 per cent experienced maltreatment as a child at least double that in any other group. Odgers’s study reinforces previous research that early intervention could help. Around a quarter of the sample were badly behaved as children, but reformed at adolescence. Many of them had the same deprived backgrounds as the persistent offenders, yet by the age of 32 they were almost as healthy as the controls.
The key question, says Odgers, is how to identify which boys are most likely to offend in later life. Possible markers include attention deficit hyperactivity disorder which affected 38 per cent of persistent offenders and a family history of alcohol addiction. Further analyses are under way to assess the impact of genes.
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