Agreement between haemoglobin estimation and anaemia recognition card in assessment of anaemia in pregnant women.

Sensitivity and specificity of pallor signs were compared to haemoglobin determination for identifying nutritional anaemia in pregnant women. A total of 211 pregnant women were examined for signs of pallor using the anaemia recognition card, and their haemoglobin was determined by the cyanmethaemoglobin filter paper technique. The sensitivity of pallor signs in identifying severe nutritional anaemia in the population was fair, as 67 per cent of the pregnant women identified as anaemic by haemoglobin levels less than 8 g/dl were detected as anaemic by the presence of pallor signs. However, the specificity of the measure indicated that almost half of the pregnant women with haemoglobin level above 8 g/dl were misclassified as anaemic by presence of signs of pallor. Since the sensitivity and specificity of the pallor signs test are fairly low, the anaemia recognition card is an inefficient tool to be used to screen for severe cases of nutritional anaemia.