Datapoints: diabetes prevalence among persons with serious mental illness and developmental disability

The prevention and treatment of diabetes among individuals with serious mental illness has been a recent focus in part because of the reportedly direct relationship between antipsychotics and metabolic syndrome. Adults with developmental disability are also at high risk of diabetes because of their sedentary lifestyle, cognitive impairments, and deficits in adaptive behavior and are less likely than other vulnerable populations to receive appropriate diabetes care. Some individuals with developmental disability also have serious mental illness. Whether they are at higher risk of diabetes than those with either serious mental illness or developmental disability alone has not been studied.