Following up
Early behavioural problems can predict trouble later in life
Story by Tara Narwani
It's not often in a researcher's career that an international news network asks for an interview. Yet, when AHFMR Population Health Investigator Dr. Ian Colman recently published an article in the British Medical Journal, CNN came calling.
Dr. Colman had just completed a study on a unique data set. The British Medical Research Council has kept comprehensive records on the 1946 British birth cohort, the entire group of children born in England, Scotland, and Wales during a single week in March of 1946. Included in this information are many teacher assessments of the behaviour of these children when they were between the ages of 13 and 15.
These assessments were of particular interest to Dr. Colman. He wondered whether certain behaviours (for example, truancy, disobedience, lying) exhibited in the early years of life could be used to predict things like unemployment, substance abuse, and broken families in adulthood.
Not surprisingly, those students who had severe behavioural problems in school had more difficulties as adults than those who hadn't exhibited these problems. The surprise, however, was the finding that this was also true for those with only mild behavioural problems.
The results go against conventional wisdom and have surprised many pediatricians. "There's a prevailing belief that kids are just going to grow out of these problems," says Dr. Colman.
The media focused on Dr. Colman's results because they point to a major public health problem. It's one thing to talk about a small group of people with severe problems that's going to have future difficulties, he says, but it's another to say this applies to a much bigger segment of the population than originally thought.
To reduce the long-term costs these results predict for society and for individuals, appropriate public health policy will have to be developed. To that end, Dr. Colman would like to investigate the people who had mild behaviour problems more closely. "We know that a group of them do quite poorly in adulthood, but many of them do quite well. The next obvious question is to ask 'what's different? What happened in these people's lives to put some of them on a positive path?'"
Dr. Colman began this study while working at the University of Cambridge in England, but he is now a faculty member at the University of Alberta since being recruited in 2007. He now plans to begin a similar analysis of two Statistics Canada studies: the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth, and the National Population Health Survey. "It's not like we were looking at very specific behaviours that were endemic to England at the time. These are things that I think are translatable around the world."
And, if the CBC calls, he'll be ready.