women’s health

selfie pictures makes women insecure

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Spending lots of time on Facebook looking at pictures of friends could make women insecure about their body image, research suggests. The more women are exposed to “selfies” and other photos on social media, the more they compare themselves negatively, according to a study.

Friends’ photos may be more influential than celebrity shots as they are of known contacts, say UK and US experts. The study is the first to link time on social media to poor body image. The mass media are known to influence how people feel about their appearance. But little is known about how social media impact on self-image.

Young women are particularly high users of social networking sites and post more photographs of themselves on the internet than do men. To look at the impact on body image, researchers at the University of Strathclyde, Ohio University and University of Iowa surveyed 881 female college students in the US.

The women answered questions about their Facebook use, eating and exercise regimes, and body image.

‘Unrealistic images’
The research, presented at a conference in Seattle, found no link with eating disorders. But it did find a link between time spent on social networks and negative comparisons about body image.

The more time women spent on Facebook, the more they compared their bodies with those of their friends, and the more they felt negative about their appearance.

“Spending more time on Facebook is not connected to developing a bad relationship with food, but there is a connection to poor body image,” Petya Eckler, of the University of Strathclyde, in Glasgow, told

She added: “The attention to physical attributes may be even more dangerous on social media than on traditional media because participants in social media are people we know.

“These comparisons are much more relevant and hit closer to home. Yet they may be just as unrealistic as the images we see on traditional media.”

‘Sense of identity’
A spokesperson for the Beat eating disorders charity said body image was a key part of our sense of identity and not a trivial matter or personal vanity.

A preoccupation with weight and shape was one of the key features of current popular culture, and was a global phenomenon, she said.

“The fascination with celebrities, their bodies, clothes and appearance has all increased the pressure that people typically feel at a time when they seek to establish their own identities and when their bodies are growing and changing,” she said.

“Young people compare themselves to the images that bombard them and feel it is their fault that their bodies compare so unfavourably.”

Source: BBC news

Number of Unsafe Abortions in Kenya ‘Worrying’

Abortion is medically defined as the expulsion of a pregnancy before viability whether spontaneous or induced.

In Kenya, the new Constitution terms abortion as illegal. However, in circumstances where the pregnancy presents danger to the woman’s mental or physical health then she has the right to access safe and legal abortion.

According to Andrew Wamalwa, a health director with the Ministry of Health, Kenya records 465,000 unsafe abortions annually and this contributes to 20 percent of the total maternal deaths.

He further observed that community attitudes contribute to the alarmingly high numbers of unsafe abortions.

“Lack of knowledge, myths and misconceptions combined with health provider attitudes are partly to blame for this high numbers of unsafe abortions.”

“Interestingly, the women who come in for post abortion care or have procured an abortion are not just the marginalised or poor as has been the stereotype.”

“This calls for leadership right at the community level within the current legal and policy framework. Educate young girls how to manage crisis pregnancy safely, show them that there are options like adoption as opposed to harshly judging them which only pushes them to undertaking back street abortions.”

Wamalwa added that the ministry is on a campaign to increase access to effective family planning to women that are of reproductive age.

“More than 70 percent of the women that seek post abortion care were not using a method of contraception prior to them getting pregnant,” he said

He also advised on safe abortion methods that are available to the woman in a case where her life is in danger.

“A woman has various options of the abortion methods; first there is the vacuum aspiration which is a manual suction to remove the contents of the uterus. This method can only be done at three or less months of pregnancy by a trained medic. If done safely then there are no complications and 98 percent success rate.”

“The second method is referred to as medical abortion and it is performed using pills. A trained doctor administers pills which causes the uterus to shrink and expel the pregnancy. This method has a few side effects like abdominal cramps and has a 83 to 97 percent success rate,” he explained.

Vania Kibui a policy advisor at IPAS Africa Alliance disclosed that under Article 43 (1A) of the new Constitution, every person has the right to the highest attainable standard of health care services including reproductive health.

She further elaborates on Article 43 (2) which says that a person shall not be denied emergency medical treatment.

“This means that one has a right to access contraceptives after a rape incident even in a private facility which includes those operated by churches that have traditionally refused to give those services,” she explained.

Kibui however raised concern in regard to Article 26 (4) which allows for safe abortion saying,” the article demands that abortions can only be performed by trained medical practitioners meaning that women that live in poor rural communities have no such services will have to procure an abortion from a clinical officer or nurse which has serious potentially fatal repercussions for the poor women,” she added.

Source: All africa

Duke University scientists find women need more sleep than men

If the woman in your life woke up grumpy this morning, don’t be too hard on her. It is, apparently, only natural.

Scientists at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina discovered that women need more sleep than men. And chances are, she’s not getting enough.

In fact the best thing a loving husband or partner can do is perhaps persuade her to get a few extra hours snuggling under the duvet. Or face the consequences.

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Scientists say women suffer more than men, both mentally and physically, if they are forced to skimp on their sleep.

As well as a higher risk of heart disease, depression and psychological problems, sleep-deprived women have extra clotting factors in their blood, which can lead to a stroke.

They also have higher inflammation markers, which indicate developing health problems.
As inflammation markers are also linked to pain, sleep expert Dr Michael Breus explained that women can literally be in more pain when they wake up.

That’s enough to make any girl feel rather grumpy.

By contrast, the state of a man’s health does not appear to be closely linked to how much they sleep.

In the study, men showed no increased risk of developing the ailments that affect women when they are sleep deprived.

“We found that women had more depression, women had more anger, and women had more hostility early in the morning,” said Dr Breus.

If this sounds like someone you know, it can probably be blamed on sleep deprivation and the fact that women are particularly susceptible to the effects. What does Dr Breus advise?

If you don’t manage to get enough sleep at night, try taking strategic naps.
However, he warned that those naps should be either 25 minutes or 90 minutes long. Any other length will make the snoozer feel worse when they wake, he said.

This is not the first time experts have suggested that women need more sleep than men.
One of Britain’s leading authorities on sleep found that women actually need 20 minutes more shut-eye. This is because of the female multi-tasking brain.

“One of the major functions of sleep is to allow the brain to recover and repair itself,” said Professor Jim Horne, director of the Sleep Research Centre at Loughborough University, England.

“During deep sleep, the cortex – the part of the brain responsible for thought, memory, language and so on – disengages from the senses and goes into recovery mode.

“The more of your brain you use during the day, the more of it that needs to recover and, consequently, the more sleep you need.
“Women tend to multi-task – they do lots at once and are flexible – and so they use more of their actual brain than men do. Because of that, their sleep need is greater.

“A man who has a complex job that involves a lot of decision-making and lateral thinking may also need more sleep than the average male – though probably still not as much as a woman.”
source: news.com

Women lose more work days than men due to illness: Study

Women have a slightly lower chance of falling sick compared to men, but they lose more days at work from being ill, a new study on Indian healthcare system by Global Development Network says.

 According to the study, women work fewer days in a year and as a result, lose almost 15 per cent of their work days to illness, while men lose only six per cent.

“Being ill, therefore, has a greater impact on a woman’s income than that of a man. On the other hand, women’s health expenditures tend to increase more compared to men,” the GDN Working Paper ‘Managing Healthcare Provision and Health Outcomes through Local Governance’ says.

The paper reveals significant positive impact of local governance and empowerment of women, and complex and sometimes surprising similarities in illness and treatment impact on men and women.

“Sickness is significantly reduced through improved access to drinking water, clean surroundings and awareness about health campaigns. These factors reduce the use of public and private healthcare, as well as private health expenditures,” it says.

GDN is a New Delhi-based public international organisation that builds research capacity in development globally.

The study says that a family’s inherited wealth reduces the incidence of illness almost equally for both men and women and reduces private health expenditures slightly more for women than for men.

“This is suggestive of some discrimination within families with regard to healthcare access,” says the study.

Individual empowerment as a result of inheritance of land by a woman has an overall positive impact on her health and use of healthcare, it says.

While in terms of access to health facilities, women are not at a disadvantage, they benefit significantly in terms of health from individual empowerment through land inheritance, it says.

The study also finds significant positive impact on both men and women due to political empowerment of women as a result of the reservation of the Pradhan’s (chief councilor) position for women.

Source: Business Standard

Women ‘more prone to breathlessness’

Women’s lung muscles have to work harder than men’s, making breathlessness more common after exercise, say scientists in Canada.

Their study in the journal Experimental Physiology examined the activity of the diaphragm – the muscle that drives lung function.

It had to work harder in women to compensate for smaller lungs, the research showed.

The research was conducted at McGill University.

Even with a man and a woman of equal size, the woman’s lungs are smaller and their airways narrower.

Breathlessness can occur after tough physical exercise or be a symptom of some illnesses such as bronchitis.

“In both health and diseases, women are more likely to show signs of breathlessness after physical activity than men,” said lead researcher Dr Dennis Jensen.

The study compared 25 men and 25 women between the ages of 20 and 40, exercising on a bicycle.

How deep and how fast they breathed at different levels of exercise were recorded. They also recorded the “drive to breathe”, the electrical signals sent to the diaphragm to control its movement.

Dr Jensen told the BBC: “Women have biologically smaller lungs and they have to activate respiratory muscles more to move a given amount of air.”

He said it was an “important insight into why women with emphysema and heart failure have worse breathing symptoms than men”.

Further studies will investigate the impact of obesity on breathlessness.

Source: Medical web times

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