Population with intellectual disability based on 2000-2007 national registers in Taiwan: age and gender.
Taiwan’s national ID registry swelled 28% in seven years, driven mostly by school-age and young-adult males.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Lin (2009) counted every person with intellectual disability listed in Taiwan’s national registry. The team looked at the same records each year from 2000 to 2007.
They noted age, sex, and total numbers to see how the pool changed over time.
What they found
The registry grew from about 71,000 to 91,000 people. That jump outpaced Taiwan’s general population growth by 13 times.
Boys and men filled the list more often than girls and women. The biggest spikes showed up in school-age kids and young adults.
How this fits with other research
Lai et al. (2012) used the same Taiwan files but zoomed in on children. They found the same steady climb and the same boy-heavy ratio, so the two papers line up neatly.
Pitetti et al. (2007) did a similar count in Finland and saw 0.70% prevalence, almost double Taiwan’s 0.40%. The gap likely comes from different rules for who gets listed, not a true country difference.
Kapoor et al. (2024) surveyed India and reported far lower numbers. Again, unlike Taiwan, India relied on door-to-door questions instead of a central list, showing how method shapes the final count.
Why it matters
If you plan services in Taiwan, expect more school-age and young-adult males to enter your caseload each year. Use the 1.37 male-to-female ratio when you budget staff and design boy-friendly group activities. When you read prevalence figures from other countries, check how they gathered the data—registry counts usually run higher than survey estimates, so match the method to your local system before you compare.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
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.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2009 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2008.05.001