CHICAGO – Younger children and those in foster care have a higher likelihood of aggressive behavior, reported Kacey Appel at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law.
Ms. Appel,who is affiliated with Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center (CCHMC), and her coinvestigators evaluated 4,148 children aged 4-18 years who were admitted through the medical center’s emergency department to the College Hill Campus, a pediatric residential treatment facility. The admissions, made between May 1, 2010 and April 31, 2014, lasted 30 days or less. The children were administered the Brief Rating of Aggression by Children and Adolescents (BRACHA) in the emergency department and later were scored twice a day using the Overt Aggression Scale (OAS), which records instances of aggression.
Investigators assessed the OAS scores, focusing on four demographic elements: age, gender, living arrangement, and history of previous hospitalizations. An OAS score of above 0 is generally considered aggressive, but Ms. Appel and her associates compared severity levels of aggression and their interplay with the four demographics.
Findings showed “no matter how you define aggression, the demographic variables remain significant,” said Ms. Appel, an epidemiology PhD candidate at the University of Cincinnati.
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