13
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: found
      Is Open Access

      Psychosocial wellbeing and physical health among Tamil schoolchildren in northern Sri Lanka

      research-article

      Read this article at

      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          Background

          Mental disorders contribute to the global disease burden and have an increased prevalence among children in emergency settings. Good physical health is crucial for mental well-being, although physical health is multifactorial and the nature of this relationship is not fully understood. Using Sri Lanka as a case study, we assessed the baseline levels of, and the association between, mental health and physical health in Tamil school children.

          Methods

          We conducted a cross sectional study of mental and physical health in 10 schools in Kilinochchi town in northern Sri Lanka. All Grade 8 children attending selected schools were eligible to participate in the study. Mental health was assessed using the Sri Lankan Index for Psychosocial Stress – Child Version. Physical health was assessed using Body Mass Index for age, height for age Z scores and the Multi-stage Fitness Test. Association between physical and mental health variables was assessed using scatterplots and correlation was assessed using Pearson’s R.

          Results

          There were 461 participants included in the study. Girls significantly outperformed boys in the MH testing t (459) = 2.201, p < 0.05. Boys had significantly lower average Body Mass Index for age and height for age Z scores than girls (BMI: t (459) = −4.74, p <0.001; Height: t (459) = −3.54, p < 0.001). When compared to global averages, both sexes underperformed in the Multi-Stage Fitness Test, and had a higher prevalence of thinness and stunting. We identified no meaningful association between the selected variables.

          Conclusions

          Our results do not support the supposition that the selected elements of physical health are related to mental health in post-conflict Sri Lanka. However, we identified a considerable physical health deficit in Tamil school children.

          Related collections

          Most cited references64

          • Record: found
          • Abstract: found
          • Article: not found

          The existence of publication bias and risk factors for its occurrence.

          Publication bias is the tendency on the parts of investigators, reviewers, and editors to submit or accept manuscripts for publication based on the direction or strength of the study findings. Much of what has been learned about publication bias comes from the social sciences, less from the field of medicine. In medicine, three studies have provided direct evidence for this bias. Prevention of publication bias is important both from the scientific perspective (complete dissemination of knowledge) and from the perspective of those who combine results from a number of similar studies (meta-analysis). If treatment decisions are based on the published literature, then the literature must include all available data that is of acceptable quality. Currently, obtaining information regarding all studies undertaken in a given field is difficult, even impossible. Registration of clinical trials, and perhaps other types of studies, is the direction in which the scientific community should move.
            Bookmark
            • Record: found
            • Abstract: found
            • Article: not found

            Gender differences in mental health.

            Effective strategies for mental disorders prevention and its risk factors' reduction cannot be gender neutral, while the risks themselves are gender specific. This paper aims to discuss why gender matters in mental health, to explain the relationship of gender and health-seeking behaviour as a powerful determinant of gender differences, to examine the gender differences in common mental health disorders, namely, depressive and anxiety disorders, eating disorders, schizophrenia, and domestic violence, and finally, to raise some recommendations stemming from this review.
              Bookmark
              • Record: found
              • Abstract: found
              • Article: not found

              Food insufficiency and American school-aged children's cognitive, academic, and psychosocial development.

              This study investigates associations between food insufficiency and cognitive, academic, and psychosocial outcomes for US children and teenagers ages 6 to 11 and 12 to 16 years. Data from the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES III) were analyzed. Children were classified as food-insufficient if the family respondent reported that his or her family sometimes or often did not get enough food to eat. Regression analyses were conducted to test for associations between food insufficiency and cognitive, academic, and psychosocial measures in general and then within lower-risk and higher-risk groups. Regression coefficients and odds ratios for food insufficiency are reported, adjusted for poverty status and other potential confounding factors. After adjusting for confounding variables, 6- to 11-year-old food-insufficient children had significantly lower arithmetic scores and were more likely to have repeated a grade, have seen a psychologist, and have had difficulty getting along with other children. Food-insufficient teenagers were more likely to have seen a psychologist, have been suspended from school, and have had difficulty getting along with other children. Further analyses divided children into lower-risk and higher-risk groups. The associations between food insufficiency and children's outcomes varied by level of risk. The results demonstrate that negative academic and psychosocial outcomes are associated with family-level food insufficiency and provide support for public health efforts to increase the food security of American families.
                Bookmark

                Author and article information

                Contributors
                alexander.hamilton@stx.ox.ac.uk
                Journal
                Confl Health
                Confl Health
                Conflict and Health
                BioMed Central (London )
                1752-1505
                6 July 2016
                6 July 2016
                2016
                : 10
                : 13
                Affiliations
                [ ]British Heart Foundation Centre of Population Approaches to NCD Prevention, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
                [ ]School of Public Health and Charles Perkins Centre, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia
                [ ]Department of Community and Family Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Jaffna, Jaffna, Sri Lanka
                Article
                81
                10.1186/s13031-016-0081-x
                4933988
                27385976
                2bac015e-3c5b-4579-b487-5bcb977551dc
                © Hamilton et al. 2016

                Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver ( http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

                History
                : 9 November 2015
                : 26 April 2016
                Funding
                Funded by: Generations For Peace
                Categories
                Research
                Custom metadata
                © The Author(s) 2016

                Health & Social care
                sri lanka,mental health,conflict,physical health
                Health & Social care
                sri lanka, mental health, conflict, physical health

                Comments

                Comment on this article