Nutrition and adults with intellectual or developmental disabilities: systematic literature review results.
No shared nutrition screen exists for adults with IDD, so each team must build its own from four basic buckets.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Humphries et al. (2009) hunted for every paper that measured nutrition in adults with intellectual or developmental disabilities.
They sorted the tools into four buckets: what people eat, body size, blood tests, and clinical signs.
No trials or treatments—just a map of how we check nutrition status in this group.
What they found
The team found no single, agreed-upon battery of nutrition screens.
Studies used different cut-offs, different tools, and different staff.
Bottom line: every clinic is doing its own thing, so results cannot be compared.
How this fits with other research
Sheppard et al. (2017) answered the call by creating two quick checklists that flag choking and pneumonia risk in the same adults.
Amaral et al. (2019) went bigger, building an ICD-9 code set that lets states track nutrition-linked hospital stays across all payers—something the 2009 review said was missing.
Anderson et al. (2019) seems to swallow the 2009 paper whole because its 2000-2019 prevalence sweep covers the same years, but the two do not clash; Lahti counts heads while Kathleen catalogs scales, so they stack, not collide.
Why it matters
If you support adults with IDD, you now know there is no standard nutrition screen. Borrow the four buckets—diet log, height-weight, bloodwork, clinical look-over—and pick one tool from each. Start there, chart the same way every quarter, and you will close the gap Kathleen flagged.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Approximately 4.5 million Americans have an intellectual or developmental disability. Concern is increasing about these individuals' nutrition-related behavior and its implications for their health. This article reports on a systematic search of the current literature listed in the PsycINFO and PubMed databases related to nutritional status of adults with intellectual or developmental disabilities. The authors used key terms for nutrition, secondary conditions, and intellectual and developmental disability and categorized literature pertaining to nutrition-related studies of adults with intellectual or developmental disabilities as follows: dietary intake studies, anthropometric assessments of nutritional risks, biochemical indexes, and clinical evaluations.
Intellectual and developmental disabilities, 2009 · doi:10.1352/1934-9556-47.3.163