Adults With Intellectual Disabilities Living in Hong Kong's Residential Care Facilities: A Descriptive Analysis of Health and Disease Patterns by Sex, Age, and Presence of Down Syndrome

Abstract

The aim of this study was to describe the health status profile and identify the healthcare needs of adults with intellectual disability (ID) residing in 18 of Hong Kong's residential care facilities. The author employed a cross‐sectional study using a structured questionnaire survey to collect data on 811 persons with ID (432 males, 53.3%, and 379 females, 46.7%) with an average age of 44. Of the residents, 107 (13.2%) had Down syndrome, 275 (34%) had epilepsy, and 134 (16.6%) had cerebral palsy. Some 25.4% were underweight and 27.3% were overweight. They had the same illnesses as the general population, but the relative frequencies were different. In terms of prevalence, the top five chronic conditions were epilepsy, hypertension, diabetes mellitus, cataract, and gout (compared to Hong Kong's general population, where the top five conditions were hypertension, diabetes mellitus, cataract, heart disease, and respiratory disease). Compared to the general population, the prevalence of epilepsy, dementia, and gout among the adults was higher and there was an earlier onset of dementia. Also noted was an increasing rate of common chronic diseases in the age group 40+. Adults with Down syndrome showed higher prevalence of cataract, gout, heart disease, thyroid disease, hemorrhoids, dementia, hypercholesterolemia, psoriasis, varicose veins, fatty liver, cirrhosis, sleep apnea, as well as prostatic hypertrophy. The author concludes that there is lack of information about healthcare service for people with ID in Hong Kong, and that the study findings should have implications for policy development in the area of healthcare services for people with ID.

Diabetes in people with an intellectual disability: a systematic review of prevalence, incidence and impact

“…Assessment of prevalence in the included studies was made using a range of methods, including data extraction from medical records [32][33][34][35][36], survey [26,[37][38][39][40], interview [41], and physical examination [21,42,43]. The largest study comprised 27 116 participants [37], while the smallest comprised four participants [17].…”

“…The average age of participants was 46 years (excluding three studies in which age was not reported); the youngest mean age was 35.4 years [21] and oldest 61.5 years [32]. Six studies were conducted in the USA [21,[33][34][35][36][37]43], three in the Netherlands [32,41,44], and one each in Hong Kong [38], China [42], Europe [39] and the UK [40]. Seven studies reported obtaining ethics clearance [21,32,33,36,38,41,43].…”

Co‐occurring medical conditions in adults with Down syndrome: A systematic review toward the development of health care guidelines

“…Clinical convenience samples ascertained through specialty clinics focused on DS or intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) have also been used to estimate the prevalence and variety of medical conditions in adulthood (Henderson, Lynch, Wilkinson, & Hunter, ; Jensen, Taylor, & Davis, ; Jones, ; Real de Asua, Quero, Moldenhauer, & Suarez, ; van Allen et al, ; Van Buggenhout et al, ). Occasionally IDD population‐based databases have been utilized to compile this information using survey methods (Maatta et al, ; Wong, ).…”

Screening for glucose intolerance and development of a lifestyle education programme for prevention of type 2 diabetes in a population with intellectual disabilities: the STOP Diabetes research project

“…Primarily, the included studies were cross-sectional observational (n = 31 81,82,98,[100][101][102]104,106,[109][110][111]114,116,119,121,124,[126][127][128][129][130][131][132][133][134][135]137,139,142,143,145 ). The remaining studies involved retrospective database or medical records data (n = 22 [83][84][85][86][87][88][89]94,95,99,107,113,115,117,118,120,122,123,136,…”