Abstract

Introduction: Adolescent girls constitute a more vulnerable group, especially in the developing countries where they are traditionally married at an early age and are exposed to greater risk of reproductive morbidity and mortality. Menstruation is a phenomenon unique to all females and associated with various mental as well as physical morbidities like premenstrual syndrome. Hence the objective of present study is to assess the status of menstrual problems among adolescence girls of Warangal city.
Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted during conducted during October 2014 to September 2015 among the all adolescent Girls of age between 10 to 19 years of age present in the study area.  A semi-structured questionnaire was used for the collection of data by personal interviews method to 261 adolescent girls in study area.
Results: It has been observed that most of the study subjects (95.8%) had some or other symptoms during menstruation. The most common symptoms during menstruation were abdominal pain (76.6%), generalized weakness (39.5%), headache (27.2%) and other symptoms (50.2%) like irritability, back pain etc.10. It was found that around 73.6% subjects had dysmenorrhoea out of which only 45.4% were taking some form of treatment. About 78.2% of the subjects have experienced pre -menstrual symptoms. The most common pre -menstrual symptom was back pain (55.2%) and absenteeism was reported in 57.5% subjects due to these problems.
Conclusion: The Present study has found high prevalence of pre-menstrual as well as menstrual problems among adolescent girls. Hence health education should be imparted covering important menstrual problems among adolescents including advice regarding source of treatment and referral. At the same time, there should be regular visits by a female medical officer for specific advice on the management of menstrual problems including dysmenorrhoea.