Health Needs for Mentally Retarded Individuals

mental retardation in order to create a new support model. In order to diagnose a child as mentally retarded, a three-step process is followed in which functional strengths and weaknesses are identified by using 4 different dimensions and 10 adaptive-skill areas. This provides a much more useful understanding of the child's capacities and limitations. However, this new definition is not widely accepted yet, even though it promises to alter socio-cultural perceptions and provide a more nuanced perspective on retardation (Fredericks and Williams, 1998).

Essentially it creates a classification system that has three aspects to it. A diagnosis of mental retardation is used if the person meets the three criteria of age of onset of 18 or under, subaverage abilities in intelliectual

functioning, and other limitations in two or more adaptive skills areas. In addition, the person's strengths and weaknesses are described in terms of inte

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ly retarded children and adults suffering from worse oral health. For example, in creating dental health profiles of a population with mental retardation in Israel, the authors noted that the M-T was 10.70 for the educable group compared with 5.52 for the group with mental retardation along with severe physical handicap. Interestingly enough, the educable group had the most sextants with no teeth. However, throughout the population there were significant treatment needs, with a participant mean of 3.32 for restorations and 0.61 for restorations (Shapira et al., 1998). Another study exploring differences in dental health within a population of non-institutionalised mentally handicapped adults attending day centers found significance difference in oral health depending upon the sub-group to which the individual belonged. The author indicated that the population - although all classified as mentally handicapped - was obviously diverse in its ability to care for oral health. Those individuals who were less mentally handicapped had better oral hygiene, less gingival inflammation, more fillings, and fewer teeth extractions. However, a greater proportion of the less handicapped group also had active, untreated caries. The
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Approximate Word count = 1742
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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