Serum total proteins and vitamin A levels of adolescent girls (10-15 years) attending a government school in Jaipur city, India.

Vitamin A deficiency is widely prevalent amongst children in India. The present work was designed to be an intervention study with nutrient fortified biscuits to ameliorate the micronutrient status of adolescent girls coming from a low socio-economic background. Baseline data on serum total proteins and vitamin A levels of 111 adolescent girls (10-15 years) studying in a government school in Jaipur city, India, were collected. The mean serum total proteins of the subjects of the present study was 6.80 +/- 0.726 g%. A very high percentage of the adolescent girls (90.1%) had serum total proteins in the normal range (>=6.0g%) and only 9.9% of the adolescent girls had serum total proteins at low levels (<6.0g%). The mean serum vitamin A level of all subjects was 21.82 +/- 6.579 mcg/dl. About 51% of the subjects were in the 'normal' category (serum vitamin A >=20 mcg/dl), 47.3% of the subjects were in the 'low' category (serum vitamin A between 10-19 mcg/dl) and only 1.8% subjects were in the 'deficient' category with serum vitamin A levels < 10 mcg/dl. The results, therefore, indicated that about 49.1% of the subjects had low levels of serum vitamin A. It is recommended that the school system can be used to distribute micronutrient fortified food products to mitigate the problem of nutrient deficiencies amongst school going children.