Societal Determinants of Anemia among Women of Reproductive Age and Role of Community Pharmacist for Its Management

Aims: To study societal determinants of anemia among women of reproductive age (WRA) and elaborate the role of community pharmacist for its management.

Study Design: To investigate the societal determinants of anemia, a cross-sectional study was conducted in the Muzaffarabad district of AJK, Pakistan.

Methodology: We collected the data from 384 women of reproductive age (15-49 years) having at least one child using a self- constructed interview schedule. The population sample size was calculated using Krejcie formula and purposive sampling was used for data collection. Two hospitals, Abbas Institute of Medical Sciences and combined military hospital Muzaffarabad were selected for blood samples to screen the hemoglobin (Hb) level of the respondents and data collection. Univariate analysis was performed to examine the frequency distributions and percentages of cases depending on a single variable at a time. The bivariate analysis was performed using chi-square test to determine empirical relationship between the anemia severity and socio-cultural risk factors of this ailment. The odd ratios were computed to investigate the odds of occurrence of anemia among respondents. The results were considered statistically significant at significance level ≤ 0.05.

Results: The findings revealed that prevalence of mild, moderate and severe anemia are 26.3%, 40.9% and 14.3% respectively among WRA, which shows that anemia is a significant health problem from public health perspective in the region. Major contributing factors are respondent’s and her husband’s education, age at marriage, number of pregnancies, knowledge about balanced diet and anemia, male preference in food intake and violence.

Conclusion: Anemia is a multifactorial problem among WRA in the study population, which can be dealt with using an integrated approach by combating malnutrition, provision of adequate healthcare, quality education and devising strategies for avoiding domestic violence. The community pharmacists can play an effective role to educate people about the selection of iron supplementation for adequate management of anemia among WRA.