BACKGROUND Common mental disorders (CMD) are a constellation of mental health conditions that include depression, anxiety, and other related nonpsychotic affective disorders. Qualitative explanatory models of mental health among reproductive-aged women in India reveal that distress is strongly associated with CMD. The relationship of perceived stress and CMD might be attenuated or exacerbated b...

RATIONALE Marked socioeconomic health-care disparities are recognized in India, but lung health inequalities between urban and rural children have not been studied. OBJECTIVES We investigated whether differences exist in spirometric pulmonary function in healthy children across the Indian urban-rural continuum and compared results with those from Indian children living in the UK. METHODS In...

Access to Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) can have dramatic impact on poverty alleviation for rural women and for achieving socio economic development goals. Rural women need to treat ICTs as an empowerment tool and a means to a living. The use of mobile communication devices and internet are changing the way agricultural activities are managed by farmers nowadays. Rural women...

Do Family Planning Programmes Help Women’s Employment? The Case of Indian Mothers The paper deals with female employment in developing countries. We set out a model to test our argument that, at the first stage of development, demographic and health programmes have proven to be more effective for women’s position in the society than specific labour and income support policies. Our household mod...

BACKGROUND Open defecation is widely practiced in India. To improve sanitation and promote better health, the Government of India (GOI) has instituted large scale sanitation programmes supporting construction of public and institutional toilets and extending financial subsidies for poor families in rural areas for building individual household latrines. Nevertheless, many household latrines in ...

In this paper, we present a framework for a multimodal interactive rural kiosk for spreading awareness about diabetes and monitoring of blood glucose level, thus aiding its diagnosis in rural India. There were an estimated 40 million persons with diabetes in India in 2007 and this number is predicted to rise to almost 70 million people by 2025. In the last 15 years the prevalence of Diabetes in...

AIM To assess the prevalence of noncommunicable diseases in a true rural farming population in South India and compare the data with the landmark contemporary Indian Council of Medical Research-India Diabetes (ICMR-INDIAB) study. METHODS Local Ethics Committee approval and informed consent was obtained from all participants. Inclusion criteria were participants, aged ≥20 and ≤85 years, from N...

Reaction to Yadav S et al: Invalid presentation of bilateral synchronous spermatocytic seminoma Kanika Sharma, Piyush Kalakoti, Kush Ohri, Suman Sahu, Sreenivas Veeranki Rural Medical College, Pravara Institute of Medical Sciences, Loni, MH 413736, India,Pushpanjali Crosslay Hospital, Ghaziabad, UP 201012, India, University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, TX, United States of America Corres...

BACKGROUND The rising prevalence of diabetes and obesity in India can be attributed, at least in part, to increasing levels of physical inactivity. However, there has been no nationwide survey in India on physical activity levels involving both the urban and rural areas in whole states of India. The aim of the present study was to assess physical activity patterns across India - as part of the ...

BACKGROUND Diabetes mellitus has reached epidemic proportions worldwide. South Asians are known to have an increased predisposition for diabetes which has become an important health concern in the region. We discuss the prevalence of pre-diabetes and diabetes in South Asia and explore the differential risk factors reported. METHODS Prevalence data were obtained by searching the Medline® datab...