Health complaints and well-being complaints among secondary school children

Abstract

Unfortunately a considerable amount of children and young people are in the so called “third state of health”, i.e. “between health and disease”. Ailment recognition, identification, prevention and “third state of health” eradication is an ideal form of preventive health care. The information on complaints of malaise that might give a hint of various diseases in secondary school age children is virtually absent. The aim of our study was to investigate the overall health complaints of secondary school age children. It was necessary to study out the range of most common schoolchildren complaints and to compare the complaints of schoolchildren belonging to different demographic groups. Interrogation covered 1017 secondary school age pupils including 510 schoolgirls and 507 schoolboys (aged 10-15 years) from secondary schools of Ukraine. It has been ascertained that only one out of every three pupils has no health complaints. The most common are complaints of emotional instability, considerable fatigue, discomfort in eyes and joints. These facts testify to high probability of developing neuropsychological diseases, musculoskeletal system disorders and visual impairments in children while schooling. A tendency to number of ailment complaints increase was observed in the 5th to 9th grade pupils.