<p class="abstract"><strong>Background:</strong> Understanding of health seeking behaviour (HSB) is essential to provide need based health care services to the population. Many factors like sex, age, type of illness, access to services and perceived quality of the services, influences the health seeking behavior. This study assessed the HSB among rural population of a coastal area in Tamil Nadu.</p><p class="abstract"><strong>Methods:</strong> A community based descriptive study was done in a rural coastal area of Villupuram district in Tamil Nadu state of India. Using simple random sampling method, 559 participants were selected. A pre-tested structured questionnaire was used to collect the data. Information about socio-demographic characteristics, presence of acute or chronic illness, health care seeking behavior and reasons for non-utilization of particular health facilities etc. was obtained. Chi square test was applied to find the association of health care seeking behavior with various participant characteristics.  </p><p class="abstract"><strong>Results:</strong> Among 559 study participants, majority (56.4%) visited public health care facilities for various illnesses. Almost one-third of the study participants visited the private health facilities and another 11.6 percent visited other health facilities including pharmacies. Among various causes, febrile illnesses (39.5%) and pain (20.8%) were the most common reasons for visiting a health care facility. Individual’s income was significantly associated with the HSB (p value &lt;0.05). Availability of services, free of cost was reported as most common reason for preferring to the public health facility. On other hand, private practitioners were preferred due to their better availability and quality of care.</p><strong>Conclusions:</strong> Public health care facilities were preferred by due to low cost of services and HSB varies with the type of illness and income of the individuals.

<p class="abstract"><strong>Background:</strong> Obesity is associated with cardiovascular diseases and has become the main public health issue in India. However, the prevalence of obesity in India varies widely. The aim of this study was to assess the prevalence of overweight and obesity among rural adults in a coastal area of South India.<strong></strong></p><p class="abstract"><strong>Methods:</strong> The prevalence of overweight and obesity was assessed among individuals of 15 years and above living in a rural coastal area of Tamil Nadu in India.</p><p class="abstract"><strong>Results:</strong> Among 207 adult participants, 69.1% were female. About one-fourth (23.7%) of the participants were in age group of 15-24 years and 67.2% participants were literate. About one-third (30%) of the adults were overweight. Obesity was present in 14% of the study participants (26% by using the Asian cut-offs). Using waist circumference and waist-hip ratio cut-offs, abdominal obesity was observed among 55% and 57% of the participants. Among females the central obesity was more common than males. <strong></strong></p><strong>Conclusions:</strong> The prevalence of obesity in rural areas was high. There is need to implement community based programs to tackle the increasing obesity.

<p class="abstract"><strong><span lang="EN-US">Background: </span></strong>Hearing impairment is the most frequent sensory deficit in human population and irrespective of the age of development, has devastating consequences. This study was done to assess the burden of hearing impairment among the rural adult population of a coastal area in Tamil Nadu.  </p><p class="abstract"><strong><span lang="EN-US">Methods: </span></strong>This community-based descriptive study was conducted in a rural area of Tamil Nadu state in India. The study protocol was approved by the institute ethics committee of PIMS. Eligible participants from all the household in the study area were selected. A semi-structured questionnaire was used to collect the information and hearing impairment was assessed by self-reporting by the participants. Proportions for categorical variables were calculated and Chi-square test was applied to find the associations.</p><p class="abstract"><strong><span lang="EN-US">Results: </span></strong>Among a total of 5621 participants interviewed and examined, 232 (4.1%) participants reported to have hearing impairment. Among them, majority reported that they have hearing impairment due to advanced age or non-specific causes resulted in hard to hearing (77.6%) and 12.5% reported to have deafness. Ear discharge (4.3%), wax (3.0%) were other commonly reported cause of hearing impairment. The hearing impairment increased with age and was common among elderly. The reported hearing impairment ranges from 1.5% to 11.3% in different age groups. Age, sex, education and occupation were significantly associated with hearing impairment (p value &lt;0.05).</p><p class="abstract"><strong><span lang="EN-US">Conclusions: </span></strong>A large number of people in rural communities were having hearing impairment. Improving access to health education and raising awareness about prevention and the needs of people with hearing loss in community is required.</p>

It has been seen that there is a clinically significant variation in the volume calculated across different planning systems for the same digital imaging and communication (DICOM) contours. Aim: The purpose of this study is to investigate the difference in volumes of organs at risk when the structure sets were exported from the Eclipse ((Palo Alto, USA Version 10.0) to XIO CMS (Electa, Crawley, UK Version 4.40.00) treatment planning system (TPS) and identify how the differences occur. Methods: We prospectively analyzed the volumes of organs at risk from computerized tomography (CT) data of 54 patients. Head and neck and brain tumors were taken for this study and contoured on Eclipse treatment planning system (TPS) after importing images from CT. These contoured images were then exported using radiotherapy DICOM transfer facility to XIO CMS planning system and compared the contoured volumes with Eclipse TPS structured volumes. Results: Our analysis showed that the differences in calculated volumes of the contours for the patients between the two planning systems can be large. Mixed results are shown for different organs with the absolute volume difference ranging from-0.25 cc to 319.73 cc. These results clearly shown that the two TPS interprets the contours differently when calculating the volume, and there is a closer match with the theoretical calculated volumes with XIO CMS calculated volumes. Conclusion: Observed discrepancies were consistent between the two planning systems. This impact of contouring variability could play a role on plan quality metrics which is used as criteria for clinical trial protocol compliance.

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