Aggressive conduct disorder: the influence of social class, sex and age on the clinical picture.

Past studies have shown that aggressive conduct disorder is more common in boys and in families of low socioeconomic status, and that affected children are usually seen in child psychiatry clinics before the age of 10. In this work we aimed to find how socioeconomic status, sex and age at admission influence the clinical picture of this disorder. We divided a series of 58 affected children into two groups on each of the three factors and compared the groups on 175 variables. We found little evidence that the children's difficulties varied with social class, sex or age. This apparent constancy of the clinical picture reinforces the idea that aggressive conduct disorder is a valid, though broadly defined, psychiatric syndrome.