Coronaviruses and people with intellectual disability: an exploratory data analysis

Background
Corona virus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has been announced as a new coronavirus disease by the World Health Organization. At the time of writing this article (April 2020), the world is drastically influenced by the COVID-19. Recently, the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19) was published. For researchers on ID such as ourselves, it is of key interest to learn whether this open research dataset may be used to investigate the virus and its consequences for people with an ID.

Methods
From CORD-19, we identified full-text articles containing terms related to the ID care and applied a text mining technique, specifically the term frequency–inverse document frequency analysis in combination with K-means clustering.

Results
Two hundred fifty-nine articles contained one or more of our specified terms related to ID. We were able to cluster these articles related to ID into five clusters on different topics, namely: mental health, viral diseases, diagnoses and treatments, maternal care and paediatrics, and genetics.

Conclusion
The CORD-19 open research dataset consists of valuable information about not only COVID-19 disease but also ID and the relationship between them. We suggest researchers investigate literature-based discovery approaches on the CORD-19 and develop a new dataset that addresses the intersection of these two fields for further research.