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  • BMC_PH_2014_Obesity

    Accepted author manuscript, 237 KB, PDF document

  • 1471-2458-14-219

    Rights statement: © 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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Obesity and health behaviours of British adults with self-reported intellectual impairments: cross sectional survey

Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review

Published
Article number219
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>3/03/2014
<mark>Journal</mark>BMC Public Health
Issue number1
Volume14
Number of pages7
Publication StatusPublished
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

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.

Bibliographic note

© 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.