ABSTRACT
Background: Voice disorders cause undesirable effects on school teachers such as reducing their quality of life, decrease in work performance affecting the quality of education, job absenteeism, and reduced social activities as well. Methodology: Voice disorder among teachers was assessed through the “Voice handicap Index”, which was developed by Jacobson et al in 1997 to self-assess the severity of voice disorder in dysphonia pa-tients Results: The overall prevalence of voice disorder among government school teachers was found to be 46.5% with a 95% confidence interval from 41.5% to 51.5%. Using Backward Wald, the binary logistic regression analysis showed that female teachers (AOR 1.6, p<0.01*), teaching experience less than 10 years (AOR 2.4, p<0.01*), and teaching hours more than 21 hours per week (AOR 6.7, p<0.01*) had a sig-nificant association with voice disorders. Conclusion: The prevalence of voice disorder was found to be high since teachers are professional voice users. The study also recommends that teachers must receive the required health education on the ergo-nomic risk factors that they will come into contact with in their daily lives as part of their jobs.
ABSTRACT
Introduction: Several anthropometric measurements like Body mass index (BMI), skin fold thickness, Waist circumference (WC), waist-height ratio (WHtR), and Waist hip ratio (WHR) are available for diag-nosing obesity at the population level. But each of them has its disadvantage as well. Neck circumference, which has been the recent anthropometric tool of interest can be used as an alternative to these meas-urements. Objective: To determine the validity of neck circumference as an anthropometric parameter of obesity and to estimate the cut-off points for obesity in type II diabetes mellitus patients. Material & Methods: This analytical cross-sectional study was done among 141 Type II diabetes pa-tients attending rural and urban health training centre non-communicable disease clinic of Sri Rama-chandra Institute of higher education and research, Chennai. After obtaining informed consent, their an-thropometric measurements like NC, BMI, WC, HC, and WHR was measured. Results: Neck circumference ≥36.5cm in males and ≥33.2cm in females is conceivably the perfect cut-off point for diagnosing overweight/Obesity in Type II diabetes mellitus. Conclusion: This analytical study deduced that NC is a valid anthropometric measurement for diagnos-ing obesity among Type II diabetes mellitus with plausible sensitivity and specificity.