More than 1 billion people, 15% of the global population, are disabled and a worldwide disability prevalence of 10% has been estimated among women of childbearing age [ 1].
Combine this with Uganda's rapidly improving bank of data on disability prevalence, and in five years' time we could imagine a scenario where anybody with access to the internet could download disability-disaggregated data on public services in their area – a game-changer for some of the activists whom ADD supports.
To present the study design and baseline results of the longitudinal International Mobility in Aging Study (IMIAS) on gender differences in physical performance and mobility disability prevalence in five diverse societies.
In the U.S. noninstitutionalized adult population, disability prevalence estimates ranged from as low as 15.3% to as high as 36.4%, while in Canada the estimates ranged from 13.4%to37.3%3%.
But Blahous implies that there are hidden, unexpected forces at work -- that disability prevalence has risen sharply since 1980 "even though there is no evidence suggesting that actual disability is much more common than it was 30 years ago".
As is consistent with previous reports [3], [4], [6], [12], our study shows that the disability prevalence increases with the advancement of age, especially after 60 years old.
In our study, one striking finding is the widening urban-rural discrepancy in disability prevalence over time although the decomposed rates indicated that the contribution of urbanization to overall disability was small in comparison with ageing.
In fact, the disability prevalence of the elderly in some western countries (higher than 40.00%) is far higher than that in China due to the different measures of disability [22] [24].
Realising this difficulty, Helander developed a 'Rapid Calculation of Disability Prevalence' for less developed regions of the world and estimated that 4.8% of a population will need some rehabilitation service [9].
The focus of this paper is to examine the possible trends of disability prevalence between two surveys and to explore the effects of both ageing and type of residence.
Even now, mainly cross-sectional studies report disability prevalence.
