• Analgesia
• Intellectual disability
• Medications
• Multimorbidity
• Pain
• Polypharmacy

• Humans
• Polypharmacy
• Intellectual Disability/drug therapy
• Adult
• Pain/drug therapy
• Analgesics/therapeutic use
• Pain Management/methods

• Seizures
• care setting
• comorbidity
• intellectual disability
• mental health

Psychotropic medication is frequently administered to people with intellectual disability with mental health and/or behavioural problems, instead of other non‐pharmacological interventions. This study describes the mental health and behavioural problems of people aging with intellectual disability, their psychotropic medication intake, and the factors contributing to a greater medication intake.

The sample consisted of 991 people with intellectual disability over 45 years. Descriptive statistics and multinominal logistic regression were carried out.

Antipsychotics were the most used psychotropic drug. Older people with mild intellectual disability living in institutions and affected by mental health and behavioural problems were more likely to take larger amounts of psychotropic medication.

Antipsychotics continue to be widely used by people with intellectual disability and mental and behavioural health problems, especially those in institutionalised settings. Future research should consider if medication intake could be reduced providing better supports in the community and non‐pharmacological interventions.

• aging
• behavioural problems
• intellectual disability
• mental health
• psychotropic medication

• Applied behavior analysis
• Behavior disorder
• Cognitive behavioral therapies
• Contextual therapies
• Intellectual disability
• Psychiatry

• antipsychotics
• associated factors
• challenging behaviour
• intellectual disability
• psychotropic medication

• Adult
• Antipsychotic Agents/therapeutic use
• Autism Spectrum Disorder
• Cross-Sectional Studies
• Humans
• Intellectual Disability/drug therapy
• Intellectual Disability/epidemiology
• Prevalence
• Psychotropic Drugs/therapeutic use

• Adults
• Adverse events
• Challenging Behaviors
• Intellectual disability
• NMDA receptor
• Psychotropic medications
• α(7) nicotinic acetylcholine receptor

• Adult
• Aged
• Clinical Trials as Topic/methods
• Forecasting
• Humans
• Intellectual Disability/drug therapy
• Intellectual Disability/epidemiology
• Intellectual Disability/psychology
• Middle Aged
• Psychotropic Drugs/therapeutic use
• Quality of Life/psychology

The longevity for people with intellectual disability (ID) has significantly increased in developed countries during the past decades. Consequently, the incidence of cancer is expected to increase in this group. The aim of the present study was to investigate the prescription of pain medication in older cancer patients with intellectual disability (ID) compared to older patients in the general population, surviving or living with a cancer diagnosis.

This Swedish national registry-based study, included people with ID aged 55 years or older in 2012, and alive at the end of that year (ID cohort, n = 7936). For comparisons, we used a referent cohort, one-to-one matched with the general population by year of birth and sex (gPop cohort, n = 7936). People with at least one diagnosis of cancer during 2002–2012 were identified using the Swedish National Patient Register, resulting in 555 cancer patients with ID and 877 cancer patients from the general population. These two cohorts of cancer patients were compared with respect to prescription of pain medication for the period 2006–2012. Outcome data were aggregated so that each patient was categorized as either having or not having at least one prescription of each investigated drug group during the study period, and relative risks (RRs) for prescription were estimated for prescription in the ID cohort vs the gPop cohort.

Cancer patients with ID were less likely than cancer patients in the gPop cohort to have at least one prescription of COX inhibitors (RR 0.61) and weak opioids (RR 0.63). They were, however, more likely to be prescribed paracetamol (RR 1.16), antidepressants (RR 2.09), anxiolytics (RR 2.84), and “other hypnotics, sedatives, and neuroleptics” (RR 1.39). No statistically significant differences between the two cohorts were found for strong opioids, antiepileptics, tricyclic antidepressants, or hypnotics and sedatives.

In the studied cohort of older people surviving or living with cancer, prescriptions for pain-treatment was less common in patients with ID compared to the general population. These results may suggest that pain is not sufficiently treated among cancer patients with ID, a situation that most likely would compromise the quality of life in this group.

• Cognitive impairment
• Learning disability
• Medication
• Mental retardation
• Neoplasms
• Pain