909 Aging with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Niry David Abstract The population of aging people with intellectual disabilities is growing at the same rate as population worldwide (Campbell & Herge, 2000; Coppus, 2013; Lifshitz, 2001). Aging among people with intellectual disabilities (ID) comes in an earlier stage in life. Thus, an old age in people with ID is determined to be 50 (World Health Organization, 2000). The aging challenges are similar to the entire population, but there are also unique characteristics to this population. There are various challenges in the aging of people with ID. They are coping with physical aging and diseases as life expectancy increases. Risk factors such as obesity and inactivity are unique to this population. In addition, those are people less accessing medical services, less reporting various health conditions and are less aware of the importance of a healthy lifestyle (Bigby et al., 2014). Additionally, they may deal with psychopathological episodes, various behavioral disorders and dementia, which are more common than in the entire population, and require the specialization of the staff for proper diagnosis and treatment (Mrayyan et al., 2019). The socio-emotional coping is also unique to this population, and since most people are not married or having children, most of their social connections are mainly with their aging families. Chapter on page 775
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