Population with intellectual disability based on 2000-2007 national registers in Taiwan: Age and gender

Primary prevention of intellectual disability (ID) has long been a goal of public health professionals, without a clear picture of the ID population, efforts to understand its nature and improve the lives for this group of people will be impossible. The purpose of this paper was to describe the over time prevalence of ID from 2000 to 2007 in Taiwan, particular focused on the age and gender distributions. We analyzed data for the present study from the 2000 to 2007 Taiwan national disability registers, mainly were obtained from two ways: (1) the Physically and Mentally Disabled Population by Aged and Level; and (2) Taiwan General Population by Age. The results revealed that the registered number of people with ID drastically increased from 71,012 to 91,004 and the general population was slightly increasing from 22,276,672 to 22,958,360 in the year of 2000 and 2007 in Taiwan. The increase rate of population in ID cases is 13.67 times of the general population (ID = 28.15%, general population = 2.06%) and the ID prevalence was increasing from 0.318% to 0.396% in this period of time. Males occupied more percentage than female in ID population (roughly the male/female ratio was 1.37). The ID population was particularly significant increased during the age periods of the school and young adult. However, in the elderly age groups (≧60 years) showed the percentage of Taiwan general population was 2.9 times of ID population percentage to the age structure in 2007 in the analysis. The present analysis suggests that the prevalence is varied in different time. Therefore, it is needed to conduct the incidence as a choice in the public health system to monitoring and measuring the occurrence of people with ID in the community.