CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 144Menstrual Health and DisordersAdolescent Sexual and Reproductive HealthHypothalamic control of reproductive hormones

Knowledge, Practices, and Restrictions Related to Menstruation among Young Women from Low Socioeconomic Community in Mumbai, India

Open access
Thakur, Harshad, Aronsson, Annette, Bansode, Seema, Stalsby Lundborg, Cecilia, Dalvie, Suchitra, Faxelid, Elisabeth·2014·Frontiers in Public Health
DOI 10.3389/fpubh.2014.00072PMC PMC4080761
Open this paper in CoChat — free accountOpen PDF

Abstract

The main objective was to assess knowledge, practices, and restrictions faced by young women regarding their menstrual hygiene. The views of adult women having young daughters were also included and both views were compared. In addition, the factors influencing the menstrual hygiene practices were also studied. The study was carried out during 2008 in Mumbai, India. The mixed methods approach was followed for the data collection. Both qualitative and quantitative methods were used to collect the data. For quantitative survey, totally 192 respondents (96 adult and 96 younger women) were selected. While young women were asked about questions related to their menstruation, adult women were asked questions to find out how much they know about menstrual history of their daughters. The qualitative data helped to supplement the findings from the quantitative survey and to study the factors affecting menstrual practices in young women. The mean age at menarche reported was 13.4 years and 30-40% of young girls did not receive any information about menstruation before menarche. It is thus seen that very few young girls between the age group 15 and 24 years did receive any information before the onset of menstruation. Among those who received some information, it was not adequate enough. The source of information was also not authentic. Both young and adult women agreed on this. Due to the inadequate knowledge, there were certain unhygienic practices followed by the young girls resulting in poor menstrual hygiene. It also leads to many unnecessary restrictions on young girls and they faced many health problems and complaints, which were either ignored or managed inappropriately. The role of health sector was almost negligible from giving information to the management of health problems of these young girls. This paper reemphasizes the important, urgent, and neglected need of providing correct knowledge to the community including adolescent girls.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.3389/fpubh.2014.00072

Cites

25 of 25 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Girls receive inadequate guidance prior to their first menstrual period and experience fear, shame, and embarrassment managing menstruation, particularly while in school.

    “Girls have indicated receiving inadequate guidance prior to their first menstrual period and experiencing fear, shame, and embarrassment managing menstruation, particularly while in school [4,6,7,17,18].”

    From A Time for Global Action: Addressing Girls’ Menstrual Hygiene Management Needs in Schools (2016) · cites this paper as [18]

    The Discussion reports that girls received no or very poor information before menarche, and the Results say a few were scared when it first occurred. The Introduction associates menstruation with shame generally, but the Results do not establish that girls experienced shame and embarrassment particularly at school; they report worries about staining and missing school, while most girls reported no problems at school. The indexed copy provides section labels but no page numbers. (LLM, conf=0.88)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

  • As reported in another study in India, hiding signs of menstruation from men made washing cloth more difficult.

    “As reported in another study in India, hiding signs of menstruation from men made washing cloth more difficult [61].”

    From ’It’s like a burden on the head’: Redefining adequate menstrual hygiene management throughout women’s varied life stages in Odisha, India. (2019) · cites this paper as [61]

  • Menstrual and material-induced pain have yet to be widely explored in low and middle income contexts specifically, apart from a few studies that highlight menstrual pain among a range of concerns for girls.

    “Menstrual and material-induced pain have yet to be widely explored in low and middle income contexts specifically, apart from a few studies that highlight menstrual pain among a range of concerns for girls [21, 61].”

    From ’It’s like a burden on the head’: Redefining adequate menstrual hygiene management throughout women’s varied life stages in Odisha, India. (2019) · cites this paper as [61]

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Research works printed but not linked: 2

  1. [22]Reddy P Rani D Reddy G Reddy K Reproductive health constraints of adolescents school girls. Indian J Soc Work (2005) 66(4): 431– 41
  2. [24]Rierdan C Rise J Living arrangement and health behaviors in adolescence and young adulthood. Health Edu Res Theory Prac (1995) 8(4): 494– 503

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
Thakur, H., Aronsson, A., Bansode, S., Stalsby Lundborg, C., Dalvie, S., & Faxelid, E.
Affiliations
  • Tata Institute of Social Sciences (IN)
  • Lund University (SE)
  • Karolinska Institutet (SE)
Corresponding author
Thakur, Harshad
ORCID
Venue
Frontiers in Public Health
Publisher
Frontiers Media SA
Published
2014-07-03
Volume
2
Pages
72-72
ISSN
2296-2565 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.3389/fpubh.2014.00072
PMC
PMC4080761
OpenAlex
W2023307648
Cited by
144
References
25
Citations by year
2026: 17 · 2025: 16 · 2024: 12 · 2023: 20 · 2022: 21 · 2021: 14 · 2020: 10 · 2019: 12 · 2018: 6 · 2017: 8 · 2016: 3 · 2015: 5
FWCI
5.31
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by
Locations
  • Frontiers in Public Health (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
  • Lund University Publications (Lund University) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
Funders
Svenska Cellulosa Aktiebolaget
Topics
  • Health Sciences › Medicine › Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health › Menstrual Health and Disorders
  • Health Sciences › Health Professions › General Health Professions › Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health
  • Health Sciences › Medicine › Reproductive Medicine › Hypothalamic control of reproductive hormones
Keywords
menstrual hygiene, adolescent girls, menstrual knowledge, menstrual practices, menstrual taboos, age at menarche, low socioeconomic status, health care delivery, Mumbai

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review