Three Indian-origin high school students in the US have won top honours in the prestigious Young Epidemiology Scholars Competition, including the first prize of $50,000.
Amrita Sehgal, an 18-year-old at Menlo-Atherton High School in Atherton, California, earned the first prize of $50,000 college scholarship for her project on Teenage Osteoporosis Prevention in the YES Competition.
It was sponsored by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and administered by the College Board. Her project was if teenagers get enough calcium to prevent them from getting osteoporosis later in life.
Two more Indian origin kids, Allan Joseph and Visakha Suresh, earned $35,000 and $15000 respectively in the competition.
Interest in sports-related injuries led Allan Joseph, 17, a senior at Saint Charles Preparatory School in Columbus, Ohio, to enter the YES contest, sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and administered by the College Board.
Visakha Suresh, 15, a junior at Plano West Senior High School, in Plano, Texas, did and it netted her a $15,000 scholarship in the same competition.
The three Indian Americans were among 60 high school students selected from more than 560 entrants nationwide to present their projects recently to a panel of epidemiologists where nearly $500,000 in scholarships were awarded.
While working at the Institute of Clinical Outcomes Research and Education (ICORE) in Palo Alto, CA, Amrita wondered if teenagers like her were taking enough calcium to help them prevent osteoporosis later in their lives.
She found that only 38 per cent of students participating in her study met the requirement for the daily recommended calcium intake, with just 20 per cent of girls and 52 per cent of boys meeting the daily recommended intake.
She also found that teenagers got less calcium in their diet as they got older.
Amrita believes her results show a need for increased health education am ong teenagers to promote the importance of calcium intake.
Allan based his study on a database that collects information from certified athletic trainers at over 100 high schools across the nation, and his study is the largest national study of high school athletic anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries ever conducted.
Allan found that athletes were eig ht times more likely to be injured during competition than during practice and that the highest risk sport for ACL injury was football for boys and soccer or basketball for girls.
He also found that in sports played by both boys and girls, girls were eight times more likely than boys to suffer an A CL injury, confirming the results of other studies.
