Mid-age health in women from the Indian subcontinent (MAHWIS): general health and the experience of menopause in women

Abstract

The UK Asian women's experience of the menopause is more similar to the Caucasian women in the UK than that of the women in Delhi. However, Asian women living in the UK and the Indian subcontinent shared the experience of poor health and reports of more physical and emotional symptoms in general. The possible reasons for these differences are discussed.

Cross-geographic region differences in quality of life in women with and without vertebral fracture

“…This seems to contradict our finding that women living in Asia had lower QoL. In another study examining the experience of menopause and QoL, Asian women living in India and Asian women living in the UK reported a lower QoL as assessed by the WHQ than Caucasian women living in the UK [22]. Interestingly, Asian women living in India reported fewer menopausal symptoms as compared to the other two groups.…”

Somatic, mood, and vasomotor symptoms at midlife in relation to family structure and household workloads in Sylhet, Bangladesh

“…Hot flash reports among women at midlife range from 15% in Bombay, India (Bharadwaj et al 1983) to 32% in Delhi, India (Gupta et al 2006). In Northern India, hot flash frequencies range from 17% (Kaur et al 2004) to 50% (Singh and Arora 2005).…”

“…The reason for these symptoms may include the hormonal changes of menopause, the wear and tear of aging, or socio-cultural factors related to changing family roles (Hardy and Kuh 2002;Dennerstein et al 2000;Gold et al 2000). Studies of menopausal symptoms in South Asia have been carried out in India (George 1996;Gupta et al 2006;Kaur et al 2004;Randhawa et al 1987;Sengupta 2003;Singh and Arora 2005) and, less frequently, Pakistan (Nusrat et al 2008;Yahya and Rehan 2003), Sri Lanka (Waidyasekara et al 2009), and Nepal (Chuni and Sreeramaredy 2011). To our knowledge, this is the first study to focus on symptom experience at midlife in Bangladesh (Sievert et al 2008).…”

Predicting menopausal health in a diverse population group through a theoretical linear model——Theoretical model to predict menopausal health

“…are derived from UNDP reports and various other studies as mentioned in the reference section. For India which is a developing country with non-homogeneous population, comparative values for cohort groups e.g., rural, semiurban or urban-metro cities have been derived using data from the present study as well as from the published work [1,2,5,6,8,9,16,[24][25][26][27]. The general profile of our economically privileged & medically insured middle aged urban (METROPOLITAN) women showed a very high literacy rate of 93% with 36% university graduates as compared to the national female literacy rate of 54% (urban vs. rural :73 vs. 46).…”

“…It is also well known that the women across different cultures and ethnicity perceive and behave differently during menopause. The cultural attributes affect women's menopausal experience in a very complex way [1,3,4,7,[13][14][15][16][17][18]. Traditionally India is a multilingual, multi ethnic, multireligious nation where population co-exists concurrently in societies corresponding to ancient, medieval and modern era, and as a result wide variations in their health status and human development index is seen.…”