Research Explores Disabilities And Health

(Left to right) Dr. Suzanne McDermott, Dr. Tan Platt, and rehabilitation engineer Catherine Graham look over statistical research data.

For the past 13 years Dr. Suzanne McDermott has done extensive research on the lives of people with disabilities. In 2000 the professor of Family and Preventive Medicine began a Centers for Disease Control-funded study entitled “Secondary Conditions Associated With Disabilities.” While the study was funded for three years, ongoing analysis continues on data collected from over 2,500 persons with disabilities and 2,100 adults without disabilities.

The objective of the research was to identify and compare specific secondary conditions in persons with disabilities with the onset and course of the same conditions in adults without disabilities as the comparison group. The conditions studied included congestive heart failure, coronary artery disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, cancer, dementia, transient ischemic attacks, hypertension, obesity, depression, diabetes and seizures. Both the case and comparison groups were comprised of patients who received primary care at the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine’s Family Practice Center in Columbia and the John A. Martin Primary Care Center in Winnsboro. The thousands of medical records of patients with disabilities were classified into five case groups: cognitive, sensory, trauma-induced, psychiatric, and disabilities with late adult onset.

“We wanted to take a look at the health of people with disabilities from the physician’s point of view,” explained Dr. McDermott, who was the principal investigator for the study. “Do they tend to be sicker than other patients? Do they present more challenges to doctors?” As Dr. McDermott and her team reviewed years of patient records, they identified relationships between particular diseases and disabilities, such as a higher rate of heart disease in people with schizophrenia and a significantly lower rate of depression in persons with developmental disabilities. With the exception of persons with severe mental illness, the incidence of diabetes was no different in the groups of persons with disabilities studied than those in the comparison group.

Dr. McDermott and co-investigator Dr. Tan Platt discovered that on the whole the people with disabilities were as healthy as the general population. “Many of these people are in a fairly controlled environment,” said Dr. Platt, an associate professor in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, and Medical Director of Columbia’s Babcock Center, one of the country’s largest residential facilities for adults with mental retardation. Dr. McDermott elaborated, “If they live in a facility under supervision, then other people are involved in their decisions and their care, with their diets and exercise set or strongly influenced by someone else.”

As the research team continues to pore through the data, both Dr. McDermott and Dr. Platt hope that the study’s results will have a positive impact on health care delivery to persons with disabilities. “I think that clinicians aren’t entirely comfortable taking care of people with developmental disabilities and have concerns about the complexity of disease process in these individuals. Hopefully we can help show that this is an appropriate population for family practitioners and internists to take care of,” said Dr. Platt.

Dr. McDermott would like to see the impact extend to the insurance industry as well. “We’d like insurers to see that the risks are not as high as they previously thought, and that these patients are not having the high cost outcomes that insurance companies anticipate,” she said.


Reprinted from Connections newsletter, August 2004

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