Prevalence of Anemia in Rural School Going Children- a Cross Sectional Study

Prevalence of Anaemia in Rural School Going Children- A Cross Sectional Study

Adolescent girls face a greater risk of nutritional problems than adolescent boys, including anaemia and underweight. In addition, over half of girls aged 15–19 (56 per cent) are anaemic. Anaemia during adolescence influences women's entire life cycle since anaemic girls will have lower pre pregnancy iron stores. As pregnancy is too short a period to build the iron stores required to meet the needs of the growing fetus, women who enter pregnancy as anaemic are at an increased risk of giving birth to children with a low birth weight (below 2,500 grams), delivering pre-term new-borns, and/or dying while giving birth. Additionally, children born to anaemic women are more likely to die before the age of one year and be sick, undernourished and anaemic, thus perpetuating the intergenerational cycle of maternal and child under nutrition. Hence the objective of the study was to find out prevalence of anaemia in high school going adolescent girls. A Cross sectional study was carried out at rural high schools of Handignur village, Belgaum, Karnataka over a period of 6 months on 569 adolescent high school girls. Cyanmethemoglobin method was used to diagnose anaemia. Data obtained were tabulated and analyses in terms of objectives of the study using descriptive and inferential statistics.

The findings of the study revealed that prevalence of anaemia was 94.5% in which 56.8% had mild anaemia, 36.4% had moderate anaemia and 1.4% had severe anaemia which is found high among the adolescent girls.