Menstrual Hygiene Practices Among Adolescent Girls of Urban and Rural Schools of Ludhiana, Punjab

Abstract

Menstruation is still regarded as something unclean or dirty in Indian society, related with misconceptions and cultural restrictions. Lack of knowledge and poor hygienic practices during menstruation can lead to various gynecological problems in the reproductive life of girls. In this community based cross sectional study on 100 adolescent girls (50 from urban and 50 from rural) age 13-18 years of urban and rural schools were randomly selected (lottery method) from two conveniently selected schools of Ludhiana district of Punjab. Data was collected in March 2013. A structured questionnaire was used to collect the socio-demographic data, menstrual profile and Likert’s scale was used to assess the menstrual hygiene practices. The descriptive statistics, unpaired t test, ANOVA test was used for analysis. Menstruation hygiene practice was found to be more in urban adolescent girls as compared to rural. Majority (n=17, 34%) of urban girls had excellent menstrual hygiene practices and 44 (88%) of urban girls were using commercially available sanitary pads as compared to 31 (62%) of rural girls. The majority of urban girls i.e. 31 (62%) and rural girls i.e. 38 (76%) had good menstrual hygiene practices. The mean score of menstrual hygiene practices of urban adolescent girls was higher i.e. 28.24 than the mean score of menstrual hygiene practices of rural adolescent girls (25.18). But the difference was statistically non-significant at p=0.05 level of significance. There was no association between menstrual hygiene practices and selected demographic variables. Efforts should be made to improve the menstrual hygiene practices of rural and urban adolescent girls so that vulnerability to reproductive tract infections be decreased and suffering of millions of women can be mitigated.