Addressing barriers to mammography for women with intellectual disabilities

Women with intellectual disabilities (ID) constitute an underserved population with respect to primary health care access and rates of screening and preventive care. In particular, women with ID are only half as likely to have a mammogram as women without ID in Massachusetts, despite living to an average age of 68. Women with ID have the same breast cancer rates as the general population but approximately double the mortality; some of this may be related to late diagnosis. In this presentation, we will briefly summarize the results of two mixed-method studies to define and explore barriers to mammography for women with ID. We will then describe a study to develop and test a media-based educational intervention regarding mammography for women with ID. We first developed and performed psychometric testing on an instrument to measure ‘preparedness' for mammography, or logistical knowledge about the specifics of getting a mammogram; then we tested the effect of our media-based educational intervention on preparedness in a sample of women with ID. Preliminary results indicate that our instrument has good reliability and validity and that preparedness scores improved among women with ID who received the intervention.