A follow-up study of adolescents with conduct disorder: can long-term outcome be predicted from psychiatric assessment data?

This study examines Swedish young adults (mean age 21) with a history of conduct disorder (CD) as adolescents. Using medical records, this study explores the relationship between adolescent inpatients and their outcomes in adulthood. Two outcome variables were used: an indication of non-successful outcome variable (seven undesirable outcomes) and sense of coherence. Using multiple regression analyses, this study showed that extracted data from the medical case record could significantly explain small variance depending on output variable. The small variance could be related to the homogeneous clinical sample, the follow-up time, the outcome variables and the absence of a biological perspective. This study suggest, clinicians should be very careful when predicting outcome in young adulthood, if they should predict outcome at all. The positive conclusion in this matter is that as far as we know any teenager with CD could have a positive outcome in young adulthood.