Datapoints: Diabetes Prevalence Among Persons With Serious Mental Illness and Developmental Disability

Abstract

T prevention and treatment of diabetes among individuals with serious mental illness has been a recent focus in part because of the reportedly direct relationship between antipsychotics and metabolic syndrome. Adults with developmental disability are also at high risk of diabetes because of their sedentary lifestyle, cognitive impairments, and deficits in adaptive behavior and are less likely than other vulnerable populations to receive appropriate diabetes care (1). Some individuals with developmental disability also have serious mental illness. Whether they are at higher risk of diabetes than those with either serious mental illness or developmental disability alone has not been studied. We compared the prevalence of treated diabetes in four groups of adults: with serious mental illness, with developmental disability, with serious mental illness plus developmental disability (“combined” group), and a random sample of the general population. We hypothesized that the combined group would have the highest diabetes risk. Data for fiscal 2005–2006 were obtained from the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences, which holds deDiabetes Prevalence Among Persons With Serious Mental Illness and Developmental Disability