Join our comprehensive review entitled "Health status and individual determinants of health in people with intellectual disabilities (ID) compared to the general population".

This is the first review on the heath status of people with ID compared to the general population.

 

The review wants to answer following key questions:

KQ1: What is the health status of persons with intellectual disabilities compared to the general population?

KQ2: How are the individual determinants of health (i.e. nutrition, alcohol, smoking, physical activity, health literacy, obesity and overweight) distributed among persons with intellectual disabilities compared to the general population?

I uploaded the inclusion and exclusion criteria to give a better overview of the studies that we are interested in.

 

Your task will be to extract data, check existing data extractions, do the risk of bias assessment of studies and discussions to reach agreement on the risk of bias assessment.

We will have regular online meetings to explain the tasks and discuss any open questions.

Most of the included studies are cross-sectional studies and retrospective cohort studies (register studies). We are using the AXIS critical appraisal tool (Downes et al. 2016) - https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/6/12/e011458 - for the risk of bias assessment.

Altogether, there are 20 data extractions and 80 data extraction checks to do. We plan to finish those by the end of March 2026.

Risk of bias assessments will be done in duplicate and then we will discuss discrepancies.

We ask people to do at least 5 data extractions/data extraction checks and risk of bias assessments, because it takes some time to get into the topic. The more the better! Depending on your contribution, you can also be added as an author on our publication that we plan to submit to a high-ranking journal. 

Estimation on time requirement for tasks:

- data extraction and data extraction check: the first ones will likely take 2-3 hours per study; once familiar with the excel-files and depending on the study, it will be faster; data extraction checks are usually faster than the extractions

- risk of bias assessment: depending on if you are familiar with the AXIS tool and the concepts that are important for assessing cross-sectional studies (sampling, outcome measures), it will likely take 1-2 hours per study in the beginning

 

Contact Ursula to be part of this review: ursula.griebler@donau-uni.ac.at

Ideally, you have already some experiences with data extraction and risk of bias assessment of non-randomized studies. If not, that is also ok, as long as you are motivated to learn and can commit the time. The work can be done remotely and from any location. The time commitment is flexible, and the work can be completed asynchronously. At the beginning there will be meetings to introduce the tasks (in different time zones) and we will have regular meetings to discuss any unclarities. Good written English and reliable internet access are important.