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Poor awareness about bone ailments
Besides the high prevalence of osteoarthritis, women have a high incidence of slipped disk and rheumatoid arthrits. Migraine disorders seem to be an almost exclusively women’s ailment with very low prevalence among men.
Prevalence of various ailments in general seems higher among woman. But certain diseases like Hepatitis-B, end -stage renal disease and oral cancer are mostly male diseases with comparatively very low incidence among woman.
Hypothyroidism, on the other hand, is an exclusively female ailment. Asurprise finding is that depression is widely prevalent cutting across gender and age groups.
When it comes to awareness about ailments, diabetes tops the list followed by HIV and various cancers, definitely heartening news for those involved in awarness campaingns for HIV and breast cancer. Yet, what is worrying is the rather low awareness level about the widely prevalent bone ailments, migraine disorders, depression and hypothyroidism.
No matter what the disease, the highest level of awarness is among people in the east zone of the country that seems to confirm their general reputation of being rather more preoccupied with their bodily well being than people from else where. The least awareness about most diseases is in the west, followed by the north and the south in that order.
The survey also revealed that hospitalisation rates were higher among woman(3.7%) than among men(2.4%), but this was almost entirely because of child birth-related hospitallisation.
However, even apart from child birth, the reasons for hospitallisation among men and woman are quite different. Among men, for instance, 38% of those hospitalised in the last year were due to surgery.
The corresponding rate for woman after adjusting for child birth was only about 32%. This might explain why the average spending on hospitalisation for women which was a llittle over Rs 29,000 while that for men was closer to Rs 43,000.