Long-term follow-up of behavioural treatment for primary encopresis in people with intellectual disability in the community

Encopresis is a major problem in high-dependency fields such as intellectual disability. tittle information is available with respect to either the: prevalence or aetiology of encopresis, probably because it Is widely regarded as part and parcel of the handicapping condition. Consequently, treatment reports are rare and confined to a small number of case studies. There is a dearth of long-term follow-up on the behavioural treatment of encopresis in the general population, and no long-term follow-up studies are available for the treatment of encopresis In intellectual disability. The present report: provides follow-up data for nine out of 10 people with mainly severe intellectual disability who had received behavioural treatment for primary retentive or non-retentive encopresis between 5 and 17 years previously. Six out of the nine subjects for whom data were available were accident-free and a further two clients were very substantially improved. interestingly, those whose former encopresis was retentive in nature maintained more successfully, despite the severity of their original impaction. The limitations of the present study are discussed.