ONS Outcomes for disabled people report

A brief post for today. 

(I would post about this paper: https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awab386 - Clinical and genetic spectra of 1550 index patients with hereditary spastic paraplegia - but this is not an open access paper, which means it is difficult to find out more details. The figure of interest is this, presented by the Spatax group (original first, then a version with SPG numbers requested by the French HSP group):

This shows that SPG4 is most common dominant and SPG7 is most common recessive, but more importantly there are still 68% (two thirds) who do not have a genetic diagnosis, reinforcing the diagnostic gap in HSP - see fig 1 here: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fneur.2018.00958/full. More on this paper if/when I can get a full version to read)

In other news, the Office for National Statistics in the UK published their outcomes for disabled people report, covering 2021.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/disability/articles/outcomesfordisabledpeopleintheuk/2021 

This has the following headlines - focussing mostly on adults of working age in the UK:

• The proportion of disabled people who reported feeling lonely “often or always” was over four times that of non-disabled people.
• Disabled people had poorer ratings than non-disabled people on all four personal well-being measures.
• Around half of disabled people were in employment compared with around 8 in 10 for non-disabled people
• One-quarter of disabled people had a degree as their highest qualification compared with nearly half (43%) of non-disabled people
• Disabled people are less likely to own their own home and less likely to live with parents than non-disabled people.

There are similarities between these findings and the findings I show in my survey results - particularly around loneliness and lower wellbeing. In more detail, they look at wellbeing and find:

• Life satisfaction scores are 6.5 out of 10 for disabled people, compared with 7.6 for non-disabled people
• Feeling that the things done in life are worthwhile score 7.0 out of 10 for disabled people, compared with 7.9 for non-disabled people
• Yesterdays happiness scores 6.4 out of 10 for disabled people, compared with 7.6 for non-disabled people
• Yesterdays anxiety scores 4.6 out of 10 for disabled people, compared with 3.0 for non-disabled people (higher numbers equate to poorer well-being in this measure)

The report shows that feeling lonely has increased from 10% to 15% since 2014 for disabled people, but has stayed around 3% over the same period for people who are not disabled. The report does not speculate why disabled people tend to feel more lonely or why this measure increases over time.