Attention to disease and risk factor
management is increasingly a feature of people with intellectual disability (ID)
as an augmented life expectancy also exposes a growing number of age-related
diseases. An additional concern is little attention to date to physical
activity, nutrition, access to social support and other personal health choices
and to environmental issues such as the impact of access to social support and
the implications of individual’s living arrangements. Method: Using a
sample of 753 persons with ID from the intellectual disability supplement to
the Irish longitudinal study on ageing (IDS-TILDA), forty three variables were
grouped into environmental, predisposing, enabling, need and personal health
choices clusters and hierarchical ordinary least squares regression examined
the contribution of environmental, enabling, predisposing, need and all combinations of the sets of variables to personal health choices. Findings: Almost 32% of variance was explained primarily by need variables. Most significant
relationships were with meeting up with family and friends (environmental),
age, rating of health and worries about getting older (predisposing), having
public health insurance and nursing who come into the home (enabling) and
presence of stroke, chronic constipation, functional limitations, high assistance
needs with activities of daily living (need). Discussion: Taken
together, the groupings of variables from the Anderson Model explained a modest
amount of variance in the pursuit of positive personal health choices by
people with ID. More work is clearly needed in developing evidence-based interventions
and strategies, and in understanding the relationship between positive personal
health choices of people with ID and health outcomes.