Developmental disabilities among children younger than 5 years in 195 countries and territories, 1990–2016: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2016

Background

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) mandate systematic monitoring of the health and well-being of all children to achieve optimal early childhood development. However, global epidemiological data on children with developmental disabilities are scarce. The Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2016 (GBD 2016) provides a comprehensive assessment of prevalence and years lived with disability (YLDs) for development disabilities among children younger than 5 years in 195 countries and territories from 1990 to 2016.

Methods

We estimated prevalence and YLDs for epilepsy, intellectual disability, hearing loss, vision loss, autism spectrum disorder, and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. YLDs were estimated as the product of the prevalence estimate and the disability weight for each mutually exclusive disorder, corrected for comorbidity. We used 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.

Findings

Globally, 52.9 million (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 48.7–57.3; or 8.4% [7.7–9.1]) children younger than 5 years (54% males) had developmental disabilities in 2016 compared with 53.0 million (49.0–57.1 [8.9%, 8.2–9.5]) in 1990. About 95% of these children lived in low-income and middle-income countries. YLDs among these children increased from 3.8 million (95% UI 2.8–4.9) in 1990 to 3.9 million (2.9–5.2) in 2016. These disabilities accounted for 13.3% of the 29.3 million YLDs for all health conditions among children younger than 5 years in 2016. Vision loss was the most prevalent disability, followed by hearing loss, intellectual disability, and epilepsy. However, intellectual disability was the largest contributor to YLDs in both 1990 and 2016. Although the prevalence of developmental disabilities among children younger than 5 years decreased in all countries (except for North America) between 1990 and 2016, 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%). South Asia had the highest burden of all developmental disabilities in 2016 and North America had the lowest.

Interpretation

The global burden of developmental disabilities has not significantly improved since 1990, suggesting inadequate global attention on the developmental potential of children who survived childhood as a result of child survival programs, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The SDGs provide a framework for policy and action to address the needs of children with or at risk of developmental disabilities, particularly in resource-poor countries.