Dental care among young adults with intellectual disability.
Young adults with ID get less dental care, but brief behavioral prep can flip nearly half from sedation to cooperative exams.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Kancherla et al. (2013) asked how often young adults with intellectual disability see a dentist. They compared dental visit records of adults with ID to same-age adults without ID.
The team also checked if more severe ID or extra diagnoses predicted even lower use.
What they found
Only 45 % of young adults with ID had a dental visit in the past year. Their peers without ID reached 58 %.
The worse the ID and the more co-occurring conditions, the less likely any dental visit happened.
How this fits with other research
Heald et al. (2020) extends this picture. They looked at adults aged 25-65 with ID and found higher attendance rates, yet those adults still got fewer fillings and more extractions. Together the two studies show access stays low and treatment may be more aggressive when care is sought.
Mammarella et al. (2022) offers a fix. After brief behavioral skills training in a mock clinic, 47 % of adults with ID who once needed sedation completed a real exam without it. The low-use finding in Kancherla et al. (2013) set the stage for this intervention.
Koegel et al. (2014) seems to disagree: adults with ID had lower, not higher, emergency-department visits for dental pain. The gap closes when you see Vijaya et al. studied routine prevention while L et al. counted crisis visits; fewer check-ups does not always mean more ER trips.
Why it matters
If you support adults with ID, do not assume missed dental visits mean the person refuses care. Severity of ID and extra diagnoses are red flags you can screen for in minutes. Add a quick dental desensitization program or mock visit tour and you may cut sedation use in half next quarter.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Dental care among young adults with intellectual disability (ID) is poorly documented and largely unmet. By using population-based data from the Metropolitan Atlanta Developmental Disabilities Follow-Up Study, we assessed factors associated with at least one or two dental visits per year among young adults with and without ID. Significantly fewer young adults with ID (45%) visited a dentist at least once per year, compared with those without ID (58%). ID severity and the presence of co-occurring developmental disabilities predicted dental care use. Sociodemographics, daily functioning, societal participation, dental services, and dental health factors were examined as predictors of dental care frequency. Our findings can help focus efforts toward improving the frequency of dental care visits among young adults with ID.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2013 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2013.02.006