Heena Sharma Blog

Weight might be the cause for one-fourth of asthma cases in kids with obesity, a recent study suggests. The research, which studied health data from more than 500,000 children in the United States, suggested that about 10 percent of all kids aged between 2 to 17 with asthma , might have avoided the illness by maintaining a healthy weight. The findings are published in the Journal of Pediatrics. " Asthma is the number one chronic disease in children and some of the causes such as genetics and viral infections during childhood are things we can't prevent. Obesity may be the only risk factor for childhood asthma that could be preventable. This is another piece of evidence that keeping kids active and at a healthy weight is important," said Jason E. Lang, lead author of the study. For the retrospective study, researchers analyzed data for 507,496 children from more than 19 million doctor's visits at six major children's health centers. Those cl...

As many as 50% of teenage Indian girls are underweight, 52% are anaemic, about 39% still defecate in the open and about 46% do not use hygienic methods of menstrual protection. These are the findings of a new survey report, the Teen Age Girls report (or the TAG report), released by Nanhi Kali, a project by the Naandi Foundation, which works with adolescent girls. As aspirations of teenage Indian girls soar, as we reported in the first part of the series, most of them struggle with gender norms and a lack of ‘new age skills’--such as travelling alone or typing out a document on a computer in English--as we reported in the second part of the series. This concluding part looks at the status of health and access to sanitation, at a time when 63.2 million teenage Indian girls are set to be first-time voters in 2019. The health of the teenage girl holds significance not only for her own life, but also for the health and well-being of the children she may have. The ...