Menstrual Hygiene Among Teenage Girls: Knowledge, Practices, Barriers and Health Outcomes in Nawabshah, Pakistan
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Adolescent girls face major menstrual hygiene challenges due to limited awareness, poor sanitation, cultural restrictions, and scarce resources in Pakistan, leading to unhygienic practices, stress, school absenteeism, and inadequate support during menarche. Objective: This study aimed to assess adolescents’ knowledge, attitudes, and practices regarding menstrual hygiene, and to explore socioeconomic, cultural, and infrastructural factors influencing their behavior. A secondary objective was to determine the association between menstrual knowledge and hygienic practices. Methods: The study is cross-sectional descriptive study with six months in Maternal and Child Health Department at PUMHSW, Nawabshah. Stratified random sampling was used to recruit three hundred girls between age 12 and 19 years. A structured questionnaire was used to gather data by addressing the demographic, knowledge of menstruation, hygiene behavior, cultural norms, and perceived barriers. The correlation between knowledge and hygiene practices was analyzed using descriptive statistics and Pearson correlation. Results: The average age of the participants was 15.6. Only a quarter of them showed proper menstrual knowledge. The use of sanitary pads was found to be at 58% with 28% depending on cloth. Almost half replaced its absorbent less than three times a day. Absenteeism by school during menstruating occurred in 39%. Affordability, privacy, school sanitation, and cultural limitations were among the major barriers. The more menstrual knowledge, the better hygiene practices (r = 0.41, p < 0.05). Conclusion: Major discrepancies in menstrual hygiene knowledge and practices by adolescent girls are evident in Nawabshah. Completing schooling, lowering the price of menstrual supplies, enhancing sanitation facilities and tackling cultural taboos will be key to improving menstrual health and physical well-being.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.034 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".