New research has shown that children with an intellectual disability or autism are up to ten times more likely to be admitted to hospital than unaffected children.

The findings by researchers at The University of Western Australia affiliated Telethon Institute for Child Health Research, have been published online in BMJ Open.

The research team looked at more than one million hospital admission records from 416,611 Western Australian children born between 1983 and 1999. 

Study leader UWA Professor Helen Leonard said the increased risk of hospitalisation varied from two to ten times that of the rest of the population.


"We expected that children with autism or an intellectual disability would require more stays in hospital but this had not been previously documented," Professor Leonard said.

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