The impact of conduct issues on future events: a rapid review

Experiences and developmental trajectories in early life (the first 1000 days of life) can shape outcomes across the life course, with downstream effects on education, employment and earnings, involvement with the criminal justice system, health and wellbeing, and patterns of service use. These impacts matter not only for individuals and families, but also because they translate into long-term public costs across multiple sectors (e.g., health and social care, education, welfare, and justice). This rapid review focuses on conduct issues (conduct problems and hyperactivity) as an influential risk factor linked to early life (the first 1000 days of life) development and synthesizes evidence on their associations with later “future events” such as educational outcomes, labor market outcomes (employment, earnings), crime/justice outcomes, and service use. The evidence base is spread across disciplines and study designs, and findings are often reported in ways that are difficult to compare across outcome domains. A focused synthesis is therefore needed to consolidate what is known about the longer-term impacts of conduct issues in a way that is usable for subsequent cost and modelling work that spans multiple outcome domains and policy sectors.