A detailed analysis of the lives of nearly a thousand people from birth to age 38 shows that a small portion of the population accounts for the lion’s share of social costs such as crime, welfare dependence and health-care needs as adults.

The study, by researchers at King’s College London and Duke University, found that just one-fifth of the study population accounted for 81 percent of criminal convictions and 77 percent of fatherless childrearing. This fifth of the group also consumed three-quarters of drug prescriptions, two-thirds of welfare benefits and more than half of the hospital nights and cigarettes smoked.

The researchers found they could have predicted which adults were likely to incur such costs as early as age 3 based on assessments of ‘brain health,’ giving them hope that early interventions could avoid some of these social costs.

They did this by combining data from a long-term study of a group of people born in the same year in Dunedin, New Zealand with electronic health records and governmental databases on such things as health, welfare and criminal justice.

At age 3, each child in the study had participated in a 45-minute examination of neurological signs including intelligence, language and motor skills, and then the examiners also rated the children on factors such as frustration tolerance, restlessness and impulsivity. This yielded a summary index the researchers called ‘brain health.’

They found that low scores on the brain health index at age 3 were found to predict high healthcare and social costs as an adult.

Professors Avshalom Caspi and Terrie Moffitt, both from King’s College London and Duke University, stress that this ability to identify and predict a person’s life course from their childhood status should be an invitation to intervene, not discriminate.

 

Any time you identify a population segment, the next thing people do is stigmatise. But being able to predict which children will struggle is an opportunity to intervene in their lives very early to attempt to change their trajectories – for everyone’s benefit. This study really gives a pretty clear picture of what happens if you don’t intervene.
Professor Terrie Moffitt, King’s College London