Publication type
Journal Article
Authors
Publication date
March 3, 2014
Summary:
Background
People with intellectual disability have significantly higher age-adjusted rates of mortality and morbidity (including obesity) than their non-disabled peers. They are also significantly less likely to be physically active.
Methods
Secondary analysis of de-identified cross-sectional data from the first two waves of Understanding Society, a new longitudinal study focusing on the life experiences of UK citizens. Interviews were undertaken with 50,994 individuals aged 16 and over in Wave 1 and 54,585 in Wave 2. Of these, 520 participants age 16-49 (1.8% of the unweighted age-restricted sample) were identified at either Wave 1 or Wave 2 as having self-reported intellectual impairments.
Results
British adults with self-reported intellectual impairments have higher rates of obesity, inactivity, tobacco and alcohol use and poorer nutrition than their non-disabled peers. Adjusting risk estimates for between group differences in age, gender and exposure to material hardship indicated that a significant proportion of their increased risk of obesity, tobacco use and poorer nutrition may be attributable to their poorer living conditions (rather than their self-reported intellectual impairments per se).
Conclusions
People with intellectual disabilities should begin to be regarded as a 'vulnerable' group in the context of public health policy and practice.
Published in
BMC Public Health
Volume and page numbers
Volume: 14 , p.219
DOI
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2458-14-219
ISSN
14712458
Subjects
Notes
Open Access article
© 2014 Robertson et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
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