Study: Learning disorders affect 9% of US children

Key takeaways:

• The estimated learning disability prevalence was 8.83% among children aged 6 to 17 over 24 years.
• Investigations on long-term trends are lacking, according to the authors.

Learning disorders are common among children in the United States, affecting approximately nine out of every 100, according to a study published in JAMA Pediatrics.

In the study, researchers from China defined learning disabilities as “heterogeneous disorders manifested by substantial difficulties in listening, speaking, reading, writing, reasoning, or mathematical abilities.”

“Literature reported that the prevalence of [learning disabilities] among children varied from 8.7% to 9.7% based on data from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) from 2004 to 2006 and the 2003 National Survey of Children’s Health, respectively,” they wrote. “However, research on long-term trend over the past decades is lacking.”

Using NHIS data from 1997 to 2021, the researchers studied a sample of 188,449 American children aged between 6 and 17 years and found that 8.76% were reported to have a diagnosed learning disorder.

The prevalence was slightly higher than in a study reported in Pediatrics, which found that 7.87% of children from 2009 to 2011 and 7.86% from 2015 to 2017 had a reported learning disorder.

The new study found no significant annual change in the prevalence of learning disorders from 8.98% (95% CI, 8.48%-9.48%) in 1997 and 1998 to 8.31% (95% CI, 7.46%-9.17%) in 2021.

However, the prevalence among Hispanic youths increased from 7.24% in 1997 to 8.24% in 2021.

“Notably, we found a rising trend in [learning disorders] in Hispanic youths from 1997 to 2021,” they wrote. “Prevalence ... differed significantly by age, sex, race and ethnicity, educational level, and family income level, consistent with previous studies.”

The rates of learning disability were also higher than average among males (11%), adolescents aged 12 to 17 years (9.78%), children whose family members did not have a high school education (11.62%) and children with a low family income-to-poverty ratio (13.46%).

References:

Li Y, et al. JAMA Pediatr. 2023;doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2023.2117.

Zablotsky B, et al. Pediatrics. 2019;doi:10.1542/peds.2019-0811.