Characteristics influencing attendance at a primary care health check for people with intellectual disability: An individual participant data meta-analysis

Health checks benefit adolescents and adults with intellectual disability, however uptake is low despite government-funded incentives.

To assess the characteristics of people with intellectual disability who, when offered a health check with their primary care physician at no cost, completed the health check.

Data from three randomised controlled trials considering health checks in people with intellectual disability living in the community were included in an individual-patient data meta-analysis. The studies used the same health check and the participant characteristics investigated (age, sex, cause of disability, level of disability and socio-economic position) were defined identically, but participants were sourced from different settings: adults living in 24-h supported accommodation, adults living in private dwellings, and school-attending adolescents.

In total 715 participants were offered health checks. Compared to participants with Down syndrome, participants with other known causes of disability were more likely not to attend their health check (odds ratio;95%CI)=(2.5;1.4-4.7), as were participants with no known cause of disability (2.3;1.2-4.3). These associations remained significant after adjusting for potentially confounding variables.

Down syndrome was the only characteristic positively associated with health check attendance across all study settings. Future research should focus on strategies to increase health check uptake in this population.