Injury Patterns among Individuals Diagnosed with Infantile Autism during Childhood: A Case-Control Study

Background: To date, injury risk among people with infantile autism (IA) has been a relatively poorly researched issue. Objective: The purpose of our study was to compare the prevalence and types of injuries in a clinical sample of 118 patients diagnosed with IA during childhood with those of 336 age- and sex-matched controls from the general population. Method: All participants were screened through the nationwide Danish National Hospital Register. The average amount of time that the participants were observed was 30.3 years (range, 27.3 to 30.4 years), and the mean patient age at the end of the observation period was 42.7 years (range, 27.3 to 57.3 years). Results: Among the 118 patients with IA, a total of 52 (44.1%) were registered in the Danish National Hospital Register with at least one injury diagnosis. In the comparison group, 226 of 336 individuals (67.3%) had at least one such diagnosis. The difference is statistically significant (P < .0001; odds ratio, 0.4; 95% confidence interval, 0.3 to 0.6), and the nature of the injuries also seems to differ. Gender, intellectual level, and concurrent epilepsy were not predictive of injury risk. Conclusions: Our results lend support to the notion that injuries that require medical attention are not uncommon among an adult population of people diagnosed with IA during childhood, but they are less common than the rate found in a comparison group from the general population. It is proposed that a diagnosis of IA is related to the likelihood of institutional care, which may have a protective effect with respect to acute hospital use

Disability pensions in individuals diagnosed with a developmental language disorder as children

Knowledge is limited regarding the association between developmental language disorder (DLD) and disability pension. The objective of this cross-sectional study was to estimate the prevalence and grounds for granting disability pensions in a group of individuals diagnosed with a DLD as children. Four-hundred and sixty-nine individuals with a DLD (consecutively assessed in the same clinic during a period of 10 years) and 2345 controls from the general population were screened through the nationwide Danish Register of Disability Pensions, covering a study period of 11 years. The results show that individuals with DLD had significantly higher rates of disability pensions granted compared with the control group: 11.3% versus 2% ('p'&lt;0.0001; odds ratio = 6.2; 95% confidence interval: 4.15–9.35). Mental disorder was the most frequent reason given for granting a disability pension and accounted for 86.8% of cases in the DLD group and 72.3% in the comparison group. The variable degree of expressive language disorder was related to the relative risk of being granted a disability pension, with the highest level apparent in the mild scoring group at assessment in childhood. Our results show that a diagnosis of DLD in childhood constitutes a strong predictor of disability pension in early adult life, thus emphasizing an urgent need for more knowledge about individual and contextual risk factors