Limited research has examined the extent to which adolescent delinquency predicts healthcare usage in young adulthood, including emergency department (ED) visits. This study used data from 3,310 adolescents (52.05% female; mean age at Wave I = 16.04 years) from the sibling subsample of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health). We examined whether adolescent delinquency at Wave I predicted ED visits at Wave III using sibling fixed effects models to adjust estimates for within-family unobserved heterogeneity. Increased violent, but not nonviolent, delinquency predicted a higher number of ED visits in early adulthood in the sibling fixed effects models. To our knowledge, this is the first study to examine the relationship between delinquency and ED usage using a sibling fixed effects design. Findings demonstrate that violent adolescent delinquency may increase healthcare usage and suggest the potential role of healthcare providers in improving outcomes for delinquent youth.

有限的研究探讨了青少年犯罪在多大程度上预测了成年早期的医疗保健使用情况，包括急诊科 (ED) 就诊。本研究使用了来自全国青少年至成人健康纵向研究 (Add Health) 兄弟姐妹子样本的 3,310 名青少年（52.05% 女性；第一波平均年龄 = 16.04 岁）的数据。我们使用兄弟姐妹固定效应模型来调整对家庭内未观察到的异质性的估计，研究了第一波的青少年犯罪是否可以预测第三波的急诊就诊。在兄弟姐妹固定效应模型中，暴力犯罪而非非暴力犯罪的增加预示着成年早期急诊就诊的次数会增加。据我们所知，这是第一项使用同级固定效应设计来检验犯罪与 ED 使用之间关系的研究。