Historically, genetically-informative research on maltreatment and antisocial development has generally relied upon retrospective parent-or self-reports of maltreatment. Such reports suffer from a high prevalence of false negatives [14] as well as marginal reliability when multiple self-reports are collected over time, [15] or when compared with reports of other family members. [16] In contrast, due to their scope and demonstrated predictive capacity, official records represent an unparalleled resource for studying the broad-based impact of child maltreatment on public health. Unfortunately, the promise of combining official records of maltreatment with genetically-informative data has thus far remained largely unfulfilled. The prior studies that have done so [11] [13] had the limitation of controlling for allelic variation in a single gene (MAOA) rather than for the totality of genetic influences on outcome, which can be parameterized in a twin design, as employed in this study.
