Fresh Amla Juice With Elemental Iron Versus Elemental Iron on Anaemia Among Adolescent Girls

Abstract

Anaemia is a major global nutritional health problem affecting people worldwide, constituting a public health challenge of epidemic proportion. Amla, as a fruit or in the form of juice was found to be the most cost effective, locally available, an all-season fruit, to have a major impact on the absorption of iron due to its highest vitamin C content. Hence, the researcher was interested in identifying the effects of the fresh amla juice on the level of haemoglobin of adolescent girls. The objectives of the study were to assess the prevalence of anaemia, and effectiveness of fresh amla juice with elemental iron versus elemental iron on level of anaemia, to associate the demographic and clinical variables with level of anaemia and to determine the level of satisfaction.Fresh amla juice was given to the study group for a period of 60 days. Iron and folic acid was provided to the study group under direct observation of researcher and for the control group under the supervision of school faculty member.A true experimental pre-test post-test design was adopted for this study .Using the simple random sampling (lottery method), two schools and the samples (104 - study group and104 - control group ) were selected. The analysis of prevalence revealed that, amongst 1009 adolescent girls, 0.7% had severe anemia, 80.7% had moderate anemia, 13.2% had mild anemia and only 5.5% of them had normal hemoglobin level. Repeated measures ANOVA F- test found that the mean hemoglobin difference is statistically significant between pre-test and post-test 2 on 60th day (F = 177.97,plt0.001). Similarly, the haemoglobin gain score from pre-test to post-test 2 on the 60th day(9.52± 1.06 Vs 11.36± 1.05, respectively with mean difference of 1.84) also showed statistically significance at plt0.001 whereas the control group gained only 0.19 gm/dl. newlineConcluded that, amla juice with elemental iron was very much effective in terms of Hb level improvement which changes the anaemic state of the adolescent girls and satisfaction. newline