Although hypothesis-free approaches have not yet yielded replicable associations for conduct disorder, there has been at least modest success in using hypothesis-driven approaches to identify association for conduct disorder related phenotypes. We cite these candidate gene associations here in view of the meta-analytic evidence supporting their association; however, even these should be interpreted cautiously, as only one (AVPR1A) was also detected in GWAS. However, it is worth noting that the landscape of psychiatric genetics is changing rapidly, and candidate gene approaches are generally not considered to reflect the state-of-the-science due to issues of replicability as well as new evidence from other areas of psychiatric genetics that the genes and gene networks likely to be relevant for behavioral outcomes may not be immediately obvious, such as the association between immune-related genes and schizophrenia that emerged through large scale GWAS (Schizophrenia Working Group of the Psychiatric Genomics, 2014).
