Substance use in individuals with mild to borderline intellectual disability: A comparison between self-report, collateral-report and biomarker analysis
Section snippets
What this paper adds?
This paper is the first to compare three strategies to assess substance use among individuals with mild to borderline intellectual disability: self-report with a questionnaire developed for this population (i.e., SumID-Q), collateral-report by staff members, and biomarker analysis of urine, hair and sweat patch samples. We found that biomarker analysis was of limited additional value compared to self-report or collateral-report in the assessment of substance use, especially given the additional
Participants
Between November 2011 and December 2012, six organizations of the Dutch Association of Healthcare Providers for People with Disabilities invited 135 individuals with intellectual disabilities (ID) who had access to substances to participate. Two individuals refused to participate for unspecified reasons, three had no MBID, one individual withdrew consent during the SumID-Q interview and caregivers of two individuals withdrew consent to participate. Whilst 127 individuals (94%) completed the
Differences between SumID-Q and biomarker analysis in willingness to participate
In addition to the fifteen individuals who refused to provide any biomarkers, several were not willing to participate in either the urine analysis or the hair/sweat patch analysis. This resulted in significantly lower biomarker participation (77% for urine sampling, 62% for hair or sweat patch sampling) compared to SumID-Q participation (94%, χ2(2, n = 135) = 39.95, p < 0.001). Post hoc tests revealed that willingness to participate in the SumID-Q was significantly higher compared to both the urine
Discussion
In this study, we compared self-reported SU (SumID-Q), collateral-report by staff members (SumID-CR), and urine, hair, and sweat patches collected from a sample of 112 individuals with MBID. To our knowledge, this is the first study to compare these strategies to assess SU in individuals with MBID.
Irrespective of the assessment strategy, high rates of alcohol and tobacco use and slightly lower – but nonetheless substantial – illicit drug use rates were found. In fact, with the exception of
Competing interests
None.
Acknowledgements
This study was funded by ZonMW, The Netherlands Organisation for Health Research and Development (project number 60-60600-97-158). The authors wish to thank participants, institutions, and research assistants for their contributions, and Neil B. McGillicuddy, Eric O. Noorthoorn, and Neomi van Duijvenbode for supporting this study and proofreading this manuscript.
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