Prevalence and Incidence of Developmental Disorders in Korea: A Nationwide Population-Based Study
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Prevalence and Incidence of Developmental Disorders in Korea: A Nationwide Population‑Based Study Sung Sil Rah1 · Soon‑Beom Hong2 · Ju Young Yoon3
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Prevalence of developmental disorders (DDs) has been increasing worldwide. This study identifies a trend in their prevalence and incidence, using nationwide population-based data to analyze the characteristics of children with DDs in Korea. The prevalence of DDs steadily increased by more than four times (from 0.6 to 2.5) from 2003 to 2017. Boys had higher incidence than girls throughout the period, during which the gap increased from 19.1 to 31.4%. The incidence also increased by the size of city and medical insurance quartile. The ratio of autism spectrum disorder, developmental delay and language disorders among the total incident cases of DDs increased by 13.7%, 817.6%, and 30.7%, respectively, indicating their contribution to the trend of increasing prevalence. Keywords Developmental disorders · Prevalence · Nationwide population-based data · Children
Introduction According to a previous study, 4.8% of school-aged children in state-funded schools or nonprofit special schools in the UK (97.2% of the total English children of that age) were identified as having developmental disorders (DDs) (Emerson 2012). In another study, prevalence of DDs among children in the US between ages 3 and 17 increased by more than 2%, from 12.84 to 15.04%, over a period of 12 years (Boyle et al. 2011). The same phenomenon is found in Asian countries. Prevalence of developmental delay, one of the subconditions of DDs, in Taiwanese children under six years old increased from 0.16 to 3.25%, making up 20% of the increasing ratio of prevalence over a 12-year period, which is even higher than that of the US (Kuo et al. 2015). Although various causes, such as changes in diagnostic criteria, research methodology, environmental factors, or * Ju Young Yoon [email protected] 1
College of Nursing, Seoul National University, 103 Daehak‑ro, Jongno‑gu, Seoul 03080, Korea
2
Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry, College of Medicine, Seoul National University, 103 Daehak‑ro, Jongno‑gu, Seoul 03080, Korea
3
Research Institute of Nursing Science, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea
diagnostic awareness, were suggested to explain this phenomenon (Matson and Kozlowski 2011; Hansen et al. 2015; Fombonne 2018), many researchers agree that the prevalence of DDs is increasing (Boyle et al. 2011; Emerson 2012; Zablotsky et al. 2017). DDs are chronic conditions that lead to physical, psychological and economic burdens for families, as well as nationally increasing medical expenses and decreasing labor productivity (Boyle et al. 1994; Lee and Kim 2014; Spindler et al. 2017). Therefore, the increasing trend of DDs has aroused attention of the society, and that leads to an increasing number of epidemiological studies for DDs (Boyle et al. 2011, 1994; Zablotsky et al. 2017;
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