Meeting the needs for health services of persons with mental retardation living in the community.

Abstract

Adequate health services are critical to the success of efforts to maintain persons with mental retardation in the community, yet information concerning the health status of this population is in short supply. This paper presents the results of a survey of 333 mentally retarded persons randomly selected from a population of 1,333 such individuals living in community settings. Almost twothirds had chronic conditions requiring medical intervention. The top five conditions in terms of prevalence were neurologic, ophthalmologic, dermatologic, psychiatric-emotional, and orthopedic. The

Screening of medical problems in adults with Down syndrome

“…A prevalence of 7% for respiratory findings was reported by Minihan and Dean (1990) but no case of significant gastro-intestinal pathology. No individual with significant respiratory or gastrointestinal pathology was found by Wilson and Haire (1990).…”

Quality of life of adults with mental retardation/developmental disabilities who live with family

“…Beange et al [1995] conducted a comprehensive study of 202 randomly selected adults with mental retardation in Sydney, Australia (40% of whom lived with relatives or independently) and found that the study group had an increased prevalence of factors associated with poor health outcomes and an increased number of chronic diseases that were frequently not recognized, or when diagnosed, not treated appropriately. Indeed, even having a regular source of medical care has been reported to be a considerable problem for adults with MR/DD, particularly among those living with their family or independently [Minihan and Dean, 1990].…”

Reproductive Health in Women with Serious Mental Illnesses: A Review

“…Severe depression symptoms, the use of antidepressants, and cardiopulmonary conditions emerge as powerful predictors of sexual dysfunction [15,54,60]. Taking a sexual history should be an integral part of any psychiatric assessment [2,5,15,31,42,45,59,66,67].…”

“…Major problems with barrier methods (female condom, vaginal ring, diaphragm) include compliance problems, improper use, and higher failure rates [51,82]. Synthetic estrogen and progestins may influence depressive and physical symptoms in depressed women [4,43,60,72,81]. Research suggests that women with major depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and cognitive impairment may be at increased risk for breast and cervical cancer [6,9,11,20,25,40,56,58].…”