Prevalence of anaemia among the adolescent athletes of national sports academy

Anaemia is one of the most important public health problem. Many preschool children, school children, adolescents, pregnant women and lactating women are at high risk of nutritional anaemia. Knowing about the causes of anaemia will be helpful to prevent this health problem. The present cross sectional study was carried out among 140adolescent athletes in which 71 and 69 were boys and girls respectively, aged 10-15 yearsof National sports academy, Khuman Lampak, Manipur. All subjects were newly admitted in the national sports academy and belonged to different sports eventssuch as boxing, wrestling, judo, archery, taekwondo and weight lifting. Haemoglobin (Hb)level of each subject was estimated using Sahli’s method. The monthly family incomes of all athletes were recorded. Thereafter, the family income has been converted into per-capita monthly income. The results of the analysis revealed that 52.18% of girls had suffered from anaemia whereas only 4.23 % of boys was in the mild grade. While examining the per-capita monthly income of the athletes, it was observed that majority of boys (36.62 % and 35.21%) and girls (42.03% and 36.23%) were in the middle and low income group. The higher prevalence rate of anaemia was found among the adolescent girls as compared to boys. The present study adolescent boys and girls depend on the same hostel diets with more or less similar family economic background of middle and low income mostly. The reason for higher prevalence anaemia among girls would be due to loss of haemoglobin iron from the red blood corpuscles of the blood during menstruation of the girls. Therefore, more care should be given to adolescent girls in particular than boys during this adolescent stage, otherwise higher level of sports performance will not be able to achieve.