ABSTRACT
Context: In India nearly 71% of adolescent girls have no knowledge about menstruation until menarche. Menstrual practices still face several social, cultural, and religious restrictions and discouragement of open discussion on the topic acts like a major deterrent in the path of menstrual hygiene management. Moreover, lack of knowledge and incorrect practices during menstruation can sometimes have serious health outcomes. Hence, it becomes imperative to ascertain the knowledge of adolescent girls about menstruation and reproductive health and the practices adopted by them during menstruation so that health education programs can to tailored to address the gaps. The study Aims: aims to assess the knowledge of adolescent girls and their current practices with regard to menstrual hygiene and reproductive health and study the association of these with socio-demographic variables. This cross-sectional community based Methods: descriptive study was conducted among 181 adolescent girls selected from two urbanized villages of Meerut district of India using a semi-structured questionnaire. For assessment of level of knowledge a scoring system was developed. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used for analysis. Based on the scoring, 77.3% of our study participants had overall poor Results: knowledge about menstruation and reproductive health, nearly 20% had satisfactory knowledge and only 2.2% had good knowledge. Most participants reported using sanitary napkins during menses (80.7%) and the remaining were using clean cloth (19.3%). 100% of the participants whose mothers were illiterate had poor knowledge about menstrual hygiene and reproductive health. Participants whose mothers were engaged in semi-skilled or skilled work were more likely to have satisfactory (39.4%) or good (4.3%) knowledge scores. Overall knowledge of our study participants regarding Conclusion: menstrual hygiene and reproductive health was poor; however the practices adopted by them during menstruation were good. The two main impediments in the path of menstrual hygiene management were lack of knowledge and non availability of services at affordable cost
ABSTRACT
Background: The distal radial artery (dRA) approach at anatomical snuff box has gained attention of the interventional cardiologist in last few years. The procedural success rate by this novel approach depends on size of the radial artery and therefore the study was planned to study the size of distal radial artery. Methods: Total of 1004 patients of >18 years of age undergoing coronary catheterization were included in the study. The vessel diameter was measured from media to media in the anatomical snuff box a day prior to coronary catheterization. Results: The mean diameter of right radial artery at conventional access site was 2.56 ± 0.35 mm and at distal access site 2.23 ± 0.39 mm (p < 0.001). Females had significantly smaller radial artery diameter as compared to males at right conventional access site (2.42 ± 0.36 mm vs 2.60 ± 0.34 mm; p < 0.001) and distal access site (2.09 ± 0.38 mm vs 2.27 ± 0.39 mm; p < 0.001). The diameter of the right dRA was not significantly correlated with age (r2 linear ¼ 0.002, p ¼ 0.0475) but was positively correlated with height and weight (r2 linear ¼ 0.076, p ¼ <0.001 and r2 linear ¼ 0.005, p ¼ <0.001) and negatively correlated with BMI (r2 linear ¼ 0.076, p ¼ 0.519). Conclusions: This study has shown the size of right dRA 2.27 þ 0.39 mm in males and 2.09 þ 0.38 mm in females. Diabetes, hypertension, height and weight are important predictors of dRA diameter