Understanding the etiology of conduct disorder is central to the goal of developing effective prevention and intervention efforts aimed at reducing its global burden. Familial factors have long been implicated in conduct disorder (Costello and Angold, 2001). The field of behavioral genetics has attempted to formalize these initial observations by disentangling the degree to which those familial influences can be ascribed to genetic or environmental factors. Our goal here is to provide an overview of this area of research. We begin with a summary of the latent genetic studies of conduct disorder and conduct disorder clinical criteria, which permit an estimation of the degree to which genetic and environmental influences contribute to variation in outcomes. Next, we review efforts to identify specific, measured genes associated with conduct disorder, ranging from candidate gene approaches to genome-wide scans of conduct disorder and related behaviors. We then turn to the study of gene-environment interplay for conduct disorder. Understanding how environmental risk and protective factors interface with genetic predispositions to predict conduct disorder is a particularly active, albeit controversial, area of research. Lastly, we close with a discussion of four key ways to move this area of research forward in the future.
