Half of pregnancies in India unintended: Lancet

Agencies
December 15, 2017

New York Dec 15: An estimated 15.6 million abortions took place in India in 2015, with the majority of women taking pills at home without adequate counselling, according to a study which found that about half of the pregnancies in the country were unintended.

Published in The Lancet Global Health, the first national study of the incidence of abortion and unintended pregnancy in India found that 15.6 million abortions were performed in the country in 2015.

This translates to an abortion rate of 47 per 1,000 women aged 1549, which is similar to the abortion rate in neighbouring South Asian countries.

"Women in India face considerable challenges trying to obtain abortion care, including the limited availability of abortion services in public health facilities," said Dr Susheela Singh, vice president for international research at New Yorkbased Guttmacher Institute.

"Our findings suggest that a shortage of trained staff and inadequate supplies and equipment are the primary reasons many public facilities don't provide abortion care," said Singh, co-principal investigator of the study.

Researchers found that the vast majority of abortions (81%) were achieved using medication abortion (which, in India, is commonly referred to as medical methods of abortion, or MMA) that was obtained either from a health facility or another source.

Fourteen per cent of abortions were performed surgically in health facilities, and the remaining 5% of abortions were performed outside of health facilities using other, typically unsafe, methods.

The study also estimated the incidence of unintended pregnancy in India and found that out of the total 48.1 million pregnancies in 2015, about half were unintended meaning they were wanted later or not at all.

Unintended Pregnancy Rate

The estimated unintended pregnancy rate was 70 per 1,000 women aged 1549 in 2015, which is similar to the rates in neighbouring Bangladesh (67) and Nepal (68), and much lower than the rate in Pakistan (93).

"Although abortion has been legal under a broad range of criteria in India since 1971, we have never had a reliable estimate of the number occurring until now," said Dr Chander Shekhar, professor at the International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS) in Mumbai.

"This new evidence provides policymakers with information that is essential for designing and implementing effective reproductive healthcare programmes," said Shekhar.

The researchers used two direct methods for measuring incidence. One was compiling national sales and distribution data on MMA (mifepristone and mifepristone-misoprostol combipacks), which represents the vast majority of all abortions in India.

The second was implementing a large-scale survey of public and private health facilities in six states - Assam, Bihar, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh - where close to half of Indian women of reproductive age live.

Currently, slightly fewer than one in four abortions are provided in health facilities, researchers said.

The public sector - which is the main source of health care for rural and poor women - accounts for only one-quarter of facility-based abortion provision, in part because many public facilities do not offer abortion services.

Close to three in four abortions are achieved using MMA drugs from chemists and informal vendors, rather than from health facilities, researchers said.

They said MMA is safe and effective when used in accordance with World Health Organisation guidelines. The researchers propose a number of steps to improve the availability and quality of abortion services in health facilities, including training and certifying more doctors to provide abortion care.

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Agencies
July 8,2020

Probiotics that broaden the mix of helpful bacteria in the gut may help to ease depression, say researchers.

Foods that broaden the profile of helpful bacteria in the gut are collectively known as probiotics. These "good bacteria" can be taken as supplements, or found naturally in yoghurts or fermented foods.

For the findings, the research team from the University of Brighton in the UK searched for relevant studies published in English between 2003 and 2019, which looked at the potential therapeutic contribution of pre-and probiotics in adults with depression and/or anxiety disorders.

Out of an initial haul of 71 studies, just seven met all the criteria for inclusion. All 7 investigated at least one probiotic strain; four looked at the effect of combinations of multiple strains.In all, 12 probiotic strains featured in the selected studies, primarily Lactobacillus acidophilus, Lactobacillus casei, and Bifidobacterium bifidium.

One study looked at combined pre-probiotic treatment, while one looked at prebiotic therapy by itself. The studies varied considerably in their design, methods used, and clinical considerations, but all of them concluded that probiotic supplements either alone or in combination with prebiotics may be linked to measurable reductions in depression.

And every study showed a significant fall or improvement in anxiety symptoms and clinically relevant changes in biochemical measures of anxiety or depression with probiotic or combined pre-probiotic use.

Of the 12 different probiotics investigated, 11 were potentially useful, the findings showed.'Probiotics may help reduce the production of inflammatory chemicals, such as cytokines, as is the case in inflammatory bowel disease, the researchers suggested.

"They may help direct the action of tryptophan, a chemical thought to be important in the gut-brain axis in psychiatric disorders," they added.

In this way, with a better understanding of the mechanisms, probiotics may prove to be a useful tool across a wide range of conditions," the authors wrote.

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Agencies
July 24,2020

Colorado, Jul 24: A new study has found that physical stress in one's job may be associated with faster brain ageing and poorer memory.

Aga Burzynska, an assistant professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies, and her research team connected occupational survey responses with brain-imaging data from 99 cognitively normal older adults, age 60 to 79. They found that those who reported high levels of physical stress in their most recent job had smaller volumes in the hippocampus and performed poorer on memory tasks. The hippocampus is the part of the brain that is critical for memory and is affected in both normal ageing and in dementia.

Their findings were published this summer in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience under the research topic 'Work and Brain Health Across the Lifespan.'

"We know that stress can accelerate physical ageing and is the risk factor for many chronic illnesses," Burzynska said. "But this is the first evidence that occupational stress can accelerate brain and cognitive ageing."

She added that it is important to understand how occupational exposures affect the ageing of our brains.

"An average American worker spends more than eight hours at work per weekday, and most people remain in the workforce for over 40 years," Burzynska said. "By pure volume, occupational exposures outweigh the time we spend on leisure social, cognitive and physical activities, which protect our ageing minds and brains."

Physical demands at work

Burzynska explained that the association between "physical stress" and brain/memory were driven by physical demands at work. These included excessive reaching, or lifting boxes onto shelves, not necessarily aerobic activity. This is important because earlier work by Burzynska and her colleagues showed that leisure aerobic exercise is beneficial for brain health and cognition, from children to very old adults. Therefore, the researchers controlled for the effects of leisure physical activity and exercise.

As expected, leisure physical activity was associated with greater hippocampal volume, but the negative association with physical demands at work persisted.

"This finding suggests that physical demands at work may have parallel yet opposing associations with brain health," Burzynska explained. "Most interventions for postponing cognitive decline focus on leisure, not on your job. It's kind of unknown territory, but maybe future research can help us make some tweaks to our work environment for long-term cognitive health."

She added that the results could have important implications for society.

"Caring for people with cognitive impairment is so costly, on economic, emotional and societal levels," Burzynska said. "If we can support brain health earlier, in middle-aged workers, it could have an enormous impact."

The researchers considered and corrected for several other factors that could be related to work environment, memory and hippocampus, such as age, gender, brain size, educational level, job title, years in the occupation and general psychological stress.

One piece of the puzzle

"The research on this topic is so fragmented," Burzynska said. "One previous study linked mid-life managerial experience with greater hippocampus volume in older age. Another showed that taxi drivers had larger hippocampi than a city's bus drivers, presumably due to the need to navigate. In our study, job complexity and psychological stress at work were not related to hippocampal volume and cognition. Clearly, our study is just one piece of the puzzle, and further research is needed."

The magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data used for the study was collected at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign between 2011 and 2014.

CSU researchers now can collect MRI data with the new 3T scanner at the University's Translational Medicine Institute.

With this new capability, Burzynska, along with Michael Thomas and Lorann Stallones of CSU's Department of Psychology, is launching a new project, "Impact of Occupational Exposures and Hazards on Brain and Cognitive Health Among Aging Agricultural Workers," which will involve collecting MRI brain scans and identifying risk and protective factors that could help the agricultural community age successfully. The project recently obtained funding as an Emerging Issues Short-Term Project from the High Plains Intermountain Center for Agricultural Health and Safety.

The Department of Human Development and Family Studies is part of CSU's College of Health and Human Sciences.

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Agencies
May 5,2020

The lockdown forced by the coronavirus in India has had some unexpected but positive fallouts: It has brought families together and reduced corporate politics, says an expert working in the field for the past decade.

"Today the whole world is on lockdown because of COVID-19, and all that we read, talk and hear is about life and death. We can't deny that the times are tough and the future is uncertain. But I would like to turn the coin and see the other side: the positive side," Shikha Mittal, Founder Director of Be.artsy told IANS in an interview.

Be.artsy is one of India's leading social awareness enterprises which deals with emotions at work and promotes arts as a communication tool for workplaces.

"In the 21st century, personally and professionally, people are practising politics over humanity, competition over collaboration, and have lost touch with themselves due to materialistic desires. During the lockdown, we are forced to confront our existing daily lives, and two interesting things that we can ponder upon, have emerged.

"First, have we ever looked at our family with the same lens as we are using today? What is it that we are doing differently with family today, and what can we do to carry our actions of today into our tomorrow? This is the premise of the #aajjaisakalcontest" that Be.artsy has launched across India.

The aim is "to encourage people to share one habit or life skill that they never practiced earlier, but post Covid-19 would like to continue and enjoy".

How did Be.artsy come about?

"I used to be in the corporate world, earning promotions and greater responsibility. However, the work conditions in those days were unfriendly to women and I had faced many instances of sexual harassment and workplace harassment in the six years of my corporate career. And that's when I had an epiphany."

Be.artsy's most popular programmes are on Prevention of Sexual Harassment (POSH) and on Financial Literacy which makes young people financially independent and better prepared to face the corporate world. "We know that a stitch in time (of planning for the future) saves nine (debt trap, dependence, health emergencies, expenses exceeding income, no savings, families without support, retirement in poverty, lost dreams, extravagance). This can only be achieved by sensitisation," Mittal explained.

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