Adolescent Health

By Alan Harper, MA, LLP

Many adults are surprised when told that children and adolescents can and do become clinically depressed. We often think only adults have the type and severity of life stressors that can result in depression. After all, we adults have to deal with careers, financial concerns, marital issues, parenting challenges, tax season, home repairs, health problems, and more. Children and adolescents have little to worry about in their relatively stress-free lives. Children simply have to do their best in their fun classes at school, play with their friends, enjoy all the toys they’ve accumulated, and put up with Mom and Dad when told it’s time to go to bed so they can rest up for another fun-filled, stress-free day.

Adolescent boys and girls have lives filled with Friday night football games, sleepovers at friends’ houses, weekends at the mall, movie dates with their exciting new boyfriend or girlfriend. They enjoy group outings at local fast food restaurants where talk is friendly and no one is teased or ostracized. Life is good as a child and adolescent. School is fun, home is stable, friends are true, and bodies are healthy. Depression can wait until the real stressors of adulthood. Right? Well…not exactly.

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Childhood obesity has been growing in recent decades at an alarming rate.  According to researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Well being and National Institute of Aging (NIA), overweight kids and adolescents in the U.S. have been acquiring fatter over the last decade.

The researchers discovered in their study published in the International Journal of Pediatric Obesity that over time, U.S. children and adolescents had drastically increased measures of adiposity like body mass index (BMI), waist circumference (WC) and triceps skinfold thickness (TST).  These increases were even much more pronounced in black girls and other sex-ethnic groups.  The exact same groups gained much more abdominal fat over time, indicated by waist size.

Racial Disparities

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NEED AND CONTEXT

It has been observed that the recent economic growth in the Asian cities indicate that there has been a breakdown of traditional support systems such as the family because of rapid urbanization and modernization. Moreover, a large number of people are living below the poverty line in impoverished environment in urban and rural communities. Their acute needs for housing, food, health, education, and incomes are the very forces that push adolescents to look for a means of livelihood on the streets, engage in prostitution, be hooked up with crime/drug syndicates, or become victims of sexual and physical abuse. It is a battle of bare struggle for daily survival and contributes in every ways they can. Any measure to penalize parents of such children will only result in further abuse and oppression of people who are already disadvantaged. Such children struggle hard in getting the most essential requirements to meet the basic needs of life and such children need special attention and educational intervention. These disadvantaged adolescents are generally malnourished and often anemic; many of them physically stunted, suffer psychologically from undue family pressures and abuses and are neglected at home. They tend to develop low self-esteem from broken families, single-headed households because of the death, separation, or labor migration of one of their parents. Moreover, they live in slums and squatter communities, sub-human conditions and are susceptible to crime syndicates and gang conflicts, substance/drug abuse, and gambling.

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Menstrual disorders in adolescents: Adolescence is the time when there is an abrupt change in the body and many questions arise in the minds of teenagers. Firstly they are not able to cope with changes and changes in second place to bring problems with them. The most challenging problems are related to menstruation in girls. Menstrual are many conditions that may require the attention of the physician or other health care. The most common menstrual disorders are premenstrual syndrome, and amenorrhea Dysmenorrheal.

Before the onset of menstruation, many women uncomfortable symptoms that last for a short period, stretching from a few hours a few days. But some of them can be very intense and can disturb the normal functioning of the person. These symptoms are grouped as premenstrual syndrome. In normal cases, the symptoms come to a halt menstruation, when the first, but for some it can last even after the menstrual periods are over. Eighty-five percent of women experience some symptoms of premenstrual syndrome at one time or another. Nearly forty percent experience symptoms so intensely that their daily affairs are affected by it and ten percent are disabled by it.

There are many pre-menstrual syndrome symptoms that can be broadly classified as neurological and vascular symptoms, psychological symptoms, gastrointestinal symptoms, fluid retention, eye problems and breathing problems. The cause of premenstrual syndrome are fluctuations in the levels of progesterone and estrogen, hypoglycemia, hyperprolactinemia, psychogenic factors, changes in carbohydrate metabolism, excessive aldosterone, progesterone allergy and water retention by the kidney. The good thing is that premenstrual syndrome can be prevented by regular exercise, balanced diet, eat and sleep properly.

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