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Anemia is an important public health challenge and accurate prevalence estimates are needed for program planning and tracking progress. While venous blood assessed by automated hematology analyzers is considered gold standard, most population‐based surveys use point‐of‐care diagnostics and capillary blood to estimate population prevalence of anemia. Several factors influence hemoglobin (Hb) concentration, including human and analytic error, analysis method, and type of instrument, but it is unclear whether biological variability exists between venous and capillary blood. The objective of this paper was to systematically review sources of Hb variability and the potential biological basis for venous and capillary differences. We use data from a recent survey in the state of Uttar Pradesh, India, to illustrate the implications on anemia prevalence estimates. Significant differences in Hb concentration between capillary and venous blood samples are common. Most but not all find capillary Hb concentration to be higher than venous. Instrument/method variability and human error play an important role, but cannot fully explain these differences. A normative guide to data collection, analysis, and anemia diagnosis is needed to ensure consistent and appropriate interpretation. Further research is needed to fully understand the biological implications of venous and capillary Hb variability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In India, progress against undernutrition has been slow. Given its importance for income generation, improving diets, care practices, and maternal health, the agriculture sector is widely regarded as playing an important role in accelerating the reduction in undernutrition. This paper comprehensively maps existing evidence along agriculture-nutrition pathways in India and assesses both the quality and coverage of the existing literature. We present a conceptual framework delineating six key pathways between agriculture and nutrition. Three pathways pertain to the nutritional impacts of farm production, farm incomes, and food prices. The other three pertain to agriculture-gender linkages. After an extensive search, we found 78 research papers that provided evidence to populate these pathways. The literature suggests that Indian agriculture has a range of important influences on nutrition. Agriculture seems to influence diets even when controlling for income, and relative food prices could partly explain observed dietary changes in recent decades. The evidence on agriculture-gender linkages to nutrition is relatively weak. Sizeable knowledge gaps remain. The root causes of these gaps include an interdisciplinary disconnect between nutrition and economics/agriculture, a related problem of inadequate survey data, and limited policy-driven experimentation. Closing these gaps is essential to strengthening the agriculture sector's contribution to reducing undernutrition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India has experienced a rising prevalence of cardiometabolic risk factors in the past 15 years: the prevalence of diabetes has increased from 5.9% to 9.1%, hypertension from 17.2% to 29.2%, and obesity from 4% to 15%. The increase is among all socioeconomic groups and in urban and rural populations, though the quantum of change varies. A concomitant increase in per capita consumption of sugar from 22 to 55.3 g/day and total fat from 21.2 to 54 g/day was observed, with significant differences between states of high and low human development index (HDI). Per capita consumption of sugar, salt, and fat is consistently and significantly associated with overweight and obesity but variably associated with the occurrence of hypertension and diabetes. Market research shows that approximately 50-60% of total salt, sugar, and fat in Indian markets is procured by bulk purchasers, generally for manufacturing processed food items. This sector of the Indian economy is among the fastest growing, with several policy incentives. It is not clear from most of the data sets whether available information on per capita sugar, salt, and fat consumption has considered the contribution of processed and ready-to-eat food items. The unprecedented changes of rapid urbanization, mechanization, and globalization demand close monitoring of social, developmental, and economic determinants. This paper provides pieces of evidence to justify a whole-of-society (WoS) framework for monitoring the inputs, processes, and behavioral components of the National Programme for Prevention and Control of Cancer, Diabetes, Cardiovascular Disease and Stroke (NPCDCS) in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural experiences come in many different forms, such as immersion in a particular linguistic community, exposure to faces of people with different racial backgrounds, or repeated encounters with music of a particular tradition. In most circumstances, these cultural experiences are asymmetric, meaning one type of experience occurs more frequently than other types (e.g., a person raised in India will likely encounter the Indian todi scale more so than a Westerner). In this paper, we will discuss recent findings from our laboratories that reveal the impact of short- and long-term asymmetric musical experiences on how the nervous system responds to complex sounds. We will discuss experiments examining how musical experience may facilitate the learning of a tone language, how musicians develop neural circuitries that are sensitive to musical melodies played on their instrument of expertise, and how even everyday listeners who have little formal training are particularly sensitive to music of their own culture(s). An understanding of these cultural asymmetries is useful in formulating a more comprehensive model of auditory perceptual expertise that considers how experiences shape auditory skill levels. Such a model has the potential to aid in the development of rehabilitation programs for the efficacious treatment of neurologic impairments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]