Cancer and learning disability.
Expect fewer total cancers but far more stomach and bowel cancers in clients with ID, especially if they lived in institutions.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Williams (1997) looked at cancer death records for people with intellectual disability. The team compared which cancers killed them versus the general population.
What they found
Total cancer deaths were lower, but stomach and bowel cancers made up a much bigger share. Lung, breast and prostate cancers were less common.
How this fits with other research
Simpson et al. (2001) later saw the same pattern in cancer diagnoses, not just deaths. Richman et al. (2001) and Williams et al. (2002) explain why: up to 90 % of adults in large residential centers carry Helicobacter pylori, a germ that triggers stomach cancer. The germ spreads through shared bathrooms and poor hand-washing. Sandberg et al. (2026) now warns the lower overall cancer rate may be fake; people with ID get screened less, so cancers are missed.
Why it matters
When you support adults who lived in large institutions, add H. pylori stool or breath tests to their annual labs. If results are positive, refer for antibiotic treatment and schedule a gastroscopy. The same clients need extra help to reach skin, breast or prostate screening, because missed visits can hide other cancers.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
This study was performed in order to complete a 60-year survey of the rate of deaths from cancer in a group of people with a learning disability. It was carried out on an in-patient population, and information was obtained from hospital records of deaths and patient medical notes. During the 10-year period studied, 13.6% of all deaths were from cancer, compared to a rate of 26% in the general population. The ratios of different types of cancer were also markedly different to those in the general population, with a very high proportion (55%) being cancers of the gastro-intestinal tract. Other types of cancer, such as those affecting the bronchus, breast and prostate gland, which cause death most often in the general population, hardly appeared at all in the in-patient population studied. The present paper explores some of the possible reasons for these findings and the implications for the current research in the wider field of cancer in the general population.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 1997 · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2788.1997.tb00714.x