National disability registers report on causes of intellectual disability in Taiwan: 2000–2007

The main purposes of the present analysis were to describe the causes of intellectual disability (ID) and examine its overtime change from 2000 to 2007 in Taiwan. Data of the present study mainly come from the public web-access information which collected by the Department of Statistics, Ministry of the Interiors, Taipei, Taiwan. Data were obtained from two ways of 2000–2007 national data: (1) The physically and mentally disabled population by cause; (2) Taiwan general population by age. The present results found that the congenital disability and the disease were the main causes among the ID population in Taiwan. The overtime trend (2000–2007) of causes among the ID population illustrated that the percentage of congenital-caused ID was decreasing and the disease-caused ID was increasing slightly. However, both of above two causes – congenital- and disease-caused ID prevalence – were increasing slightly in the Taiwan general population in the year 2000–2007. The present analysis suggests that the current disability registers should re-examine the ID-caused categories according to the evidence-based literatures regarding attributive risks for this group of people in Taiwan.