Olusanya BO, et al. - Study authors investigated the prevalence of disability and years lived with disability (YLDs) among children aged < 5 years with developmental disabilities based on findings from Global Burden of Disease 2016. Results suggested that the global burden of developmental disabilities has not significantly improved since 1990, implying inadequate global attention on the developmental potential of children who survived childhood as a result of child survival programs, especially in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The Sustainable Development Goals provides a framework for policy and action to address the needs of children with or at risk of developmental disabilities, especially in nations with a paucity of resources.

Methods

• Researchers assessed prevalence and YLDs for epilepsy, intellectual disability, hearing loss, vision loss, autism spectrum disorder, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
• YLDs were evaluated as the product of the prevalence estimate and the disability weight for each mutually exclusive disorder, corrected for comorbidity.
• They utilized DisMod-MR 2.1, a Bayesian meta-regression tool, on a pool of primary data derived from systematic reviews of the literature, health surveys, hospital and claims databases, cohort studies, and disease-specific registries.

Results

• Globally, compared with 53.0 million (95% uncertainty interval: 49.0–57.1; or 8.9% [8.2–9.5]) children in 1990, 52.9 million (48.7–57.3; or 8·4% [7·7–9·1]) children aged < 5 years (54% males) had developmental disabilities in 2016.
• Approximately 95% of these children resided in low-income and middle-income countries.
• YLDs among these children increased from 3.8 million (2.8–4.9) in 1990 to 3·9 million (2.9–5.2) in 2016.
• Among children aged < 5 years in 2016, these disabilities accounted for 13.3% of the 29.3 million YLDs for all health conditions.
• The most prevalent disability was vision loss, followed by hearing loss, intellectual disability, and autism spectrum disorder.
• The largest contributor to YLDs in both 1990 and 2016 was intellectual disability.
• The number of children with developmental disabilities increased significantly in sub-Saharan Africa (71.3%) and in North Africa and the Middle East (7.6%) although the prevalence of developmental disabilities among children aged < 5 years decreased in all countries (except for North America) between 1990 and 2016.
• Findings revealed that South Asia had the highest prevalence of children with developmental disabilities in 2016 and North America had the lowest.