Examining potential factors underlying the increased risk of severe COVID-19 experienced by people living with intellectual and developmental disabilities
People living with intellectual and developmental disabilities (i.e. intellectual disabilities and/or autism) are more likely to be admitted to hospital and die from infection with COVID-19. We do not know why people living with intellectual and developmental disabilities experience poorer outcomes following infection with COVID-19.
These poorer outcomes from COVID-19 infection may be caused by people living with intellectual and developmental disabilities:
- having higher rates of health problems
- being more likely to have two or more serious health problems (multimorbidity)
- commonly taking several different medications (polypharmacy).
This distinct pattern of health problems experienced by people living with intellectual and developmental disabilities may increase the risk of poorer outcomes from COVID-19 infection. For example, epilepsy is more commonly experienced by people living with intellectual and developmental disabilities, and epilepsy is a known risk factor for premature death from respiratory infections, like COVID-19. Lower rates of vaccination and the type of vaccine that people receive might also influence the higher risk of poorer outcomes.
We will investigate whether the complex health problems experienced by people living with intellectual and developmental disabilities and vaccination patterns are linked to poorer COVID-19 outcomes. We hope that the results of this study will help improve outcomes of people living with intellectual and developmental disabilities who are infected with COVID-19.
The issues outlined above will be addressed in outputs from a number of related sub-projects. Follow the links below to view repositories containing the protocol, data curation and analysis code, and phenotyping algorithms and codelists for each sub-project:
Links to repositories for additional outputs will follow in due course.
This project has been approved by the CVD-COVID-UK/COVID-IMPACT Approvals & Oversight Board (Project ID: CCU030)