Using retrospective data collected on 2580 complete twin pairs from the population-based Virginia Adult Twin Study of Psychiatric and Substance Use Disorders sample, Jacobson et al. (2002) found that the heritability of DSM-III-R conduct disorder symptomatology increases between childhood (< 15 years) and adolescence (15–17 years) for both males (h2 = 0.06 and 0.41, respectively) and females (h2 = 0.29 and 0.50, respectively). Furthermore, they found overlapping and unique genetic influences on conduct disorder symptomatology in childhood and adolescence. These findings provide evidence that the genetic influences on conduct disorder increase over time, and that this increase in heritability is in part due to genetic innovation, or new genes coming “online” to influence conduct disorder across development.
