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Tag: cardiac

  • Nutritionists: Daily breakfast ‘ll ensure cardiac, physical health

    Nutritionists: Daily breakfast ‘ll ensure cardiac, physical health

    The Nutrition Society of Nigeria (NSN) has recommended daily intake of breakfast to maintain a healthy body weight and cardiac health.

    The Vice President of the society, Mr. Bartholomew Brai, said breakfast skipping had been found to pre-dispose people of various age groups to obesity and low levels of physical activity.

    This is because skipping breakfast leads to over-eating later in the day and, as such, encourages nibbling on high calorie snacks during the day, he added.

    He spoke at the re-launch of Milo with Activ-Go in Lagos.

    According to Brai, regular breakfast eaters have higher dietary quality as they usually have increased intake of fibre, calcium, vitamins A & C, riboflavin, zinc and iron as well as decreased intake of fat, cholesterol and calories.

    “Breakfast also provides people with the energy to keep going throughout the day. This encourages them to stay active which, in turn, helps to burn unwanted fat,” he said.

    Giving other reasons why breakfast is important, Brai said it breaks the overnight fast and supplies the energy to kick start the metabolism for the day.

    “It also supplies many beneficial nutrients and re-fuels glycogen stores. Regular eating  of breakfast has been shown to improve performance (memory recall, attention span and creativity) in school children and children who eat breakfast are known to be more physically fit and active,” he said.

    Describing breakfast as the ‘most important meal of the day’, Brai expressed regret that this meal is, however, usually the most likely meal to be skipped in a day.

    Nutritionists, he said, recommend that people take breakfast within an hour of waking up and not later than 8 o’clock in the morning to get its full benefits.

    While breakfast foods vary from place to place, culture to culture, household to household and from individual to individual; breakfast should include: carbohydrates (e.g. grains or cereals, bread); Protein (e.g. beans, eggs, fish, meat); Beverages (e. g. Milo, tea, coffee, milk, yoghurt) and Fruits & Vegetables (e. g. apple, orange, banana, spinach, lettuce, cabbage, cucumber).

    Recommending its addition to a healthy breakfast formula, Dr. Bartholomew Brai said Milo has been re- formulated and is now fortified with ACTIV-GO made from PROTOMALT extract and a specifically designed combination of nine micro-nutrients including six vitamins and three minerals. He said the Nutrition Society of Nigeria took time to do the analyses of the Milo product and found out that it is first in its class.

    “The Milo Activ –Go re-launched is another momentous achievement of Nestle Milo. I really commend the innovation that went into the new Milo with Activ-Go which is a unique blend of vitamins and minerals that help the individual to achieve the Milo promise.”

    The NSN Vice President insisted that the specific size and type of breakfast is not too important as the goal at breakfast is to replenish liver glycogen.

    The Category Manager-Beverages at Nestle Nigeria Plc, Olufemi Akintola who traced the history of Milo since it was first formulated in Australia in 1934, stated that ‘“Milo, through its unique delicious coco malt  taste  provides winning energy for daily success.

    “Activ–Go supports energy release, muscle function and bone maintenance that are essential for physical activity in children”.

     

  • Epidemic of cardiac and renal diseases and the Lagos panacea

    Epidemic of cardiac and renal diseases and the Lagos panacea

    Gboyega Alaka highlights the continued devastation of Nigerian’s by cardiac and renal diseases, as they attain epidemic level globally, even as he chronicles the recent Lagos State Cardiac and Renal Centre, as a panacea.

    Twice frontline actor, Prince Ifeanyi Dike had to go to India to attend to his ailing kidneys. Twice he also had to undergo kidney transplants because the first transplant failed, and to stay alive, he had to travel the delicate route one more time. For the first time, he also shared his well-kept secret of how felt too embarrassed to call for public help on the second mission; hence he had to go it secretly  probably with the help of a few close friends and family.  The good news however, was, he survived.

    Radio jockey, Steve ‘the sleek’ Kadiri wasn’t that lucky. Like Dike, his first transplant also failed. Like Dike, he too wasn’t able to call for public help until friends, led by Alariwo and co took up his case and launched another appeal. But unlike Dike, Kadiri did not survive. He died before the funding for the second transplant could be fully raised.

    President Umaru Yar’adua, with all of the Nigerian state’s machinery and endless cash at his disposal also did not survive. He lost his battle with the highly mortal kidney ailment, despite going to the best hospital in Saudi Arabia. Forget that he embarrassed the Nigerian nation in the process, as many thought the federal government as the sixth largest crude oil producer in the world had no business taking its president to a fellow oil producing state. Not even if it was the world’s number one in the OPEC ranking.

    53 year-old Rahila Jiboyewa, an economics teacher at the University of Maiduguri Staff School is currently facing the battle of her life. After an initial mis-diagnosis in Nigeria that focused treatment on her diabetes, doctors in India have confirmed that her problems were indeed caused by her ailing kidneys, which they say have all but packed up.

    So she has been busy in the last couple of weeks, raising money through good-spirited Nigerians to go for treatment that includes series of dialysis and a kidney transplant in India. She would need a whopping N8million in the least to pay for the treatments and all the appendages of flight for herself and her companion, feeding and accommodation. She needs so much money because her country ‘does’ not have the capacity to take care of her situation, otherwise, she just have had to raise half of that amount for her treatment. The mis-diagnoses and other nasty experiences she went through in Nigerian hospitals and in the hands of fellow Nigerian health personnel, would not even make her consider a Nigerian option, if there were any.  Not even a dialysis session, as she has seen how a Nigerian hospital infected a fellow renal disease patient, during a pre-dialysis operation, complicating her situation in the process.

    Of course the cases of actor Muna Obiekwe and radio guru Chaz B are still fresh in our minds.

    So much for renal-related diseases.

    Just last month, 13-year old Prince Tomiwa Adewale Abegunde returned from the United States of America, where he had gone for a vital hole in the heart operation, sponsored by the America-based Gift of Life Foundation. Today, Adewale lives, to the glory of God and the goodwill of a foreign NGO and a foreign facility. Truth however was that before the NGO came on the scene, Prince Adewale’s parents’ hopes were only hinged on prayers and a miracle, which they probably didn’t believe, deep down, could surface. The whole of their country, Nigeria didn’t have the ability to take care of their boy’s cardiac ailment, and unless they raised about N5million, together with flight and accommodation fee, their lovable son’s fate was probably dicey.

    Also, one is not likely to forget too soon, the pathetic story of Adetokunbo and Peace Kalejaye, published in the Nigerian media about a year ago, where their three-year old girl, Desola had been diagnosed with a 12.5mm hole in the heart situation and needed urgent surgery overseas. Even before her birth, the couple had known that difficult times lay ahead, having been forced to bring their daughter to the world prematurely through a caesarean section. Then the doctors had warned that the foetus was not feeding well and was losing too much weight. On delivery, tests showed that she was suffering from hernia, which they said required an operation, that they recommended should be differed till a bit later, when she is older and stronger. The hole in the heart diagnosis, which came seven months after her birth, was therefore a case of double sorrow for both parents.

    Aside the trauma they suffered as parents, they still had to contend with the hard task of raising N3.5 million.

    A sizable number of Nigerian children suffer from hole in the heart ailments on a regular basis, putting their parents in desperate and panicky situations. That most of these parents are average Nigerians, who can hardly afford three square meals and the regular health treatments, have also meant them coming out cap in hand to seek for public support before accessing the treatment. Inevitably, many die in the process, literally extinguishing their parents dream build around them.

    Just last week, Sulaimon Owolabi walked into The Nation’s office in Ladipo, Mushin, desperately crying for help. He wanted a public appeal story done for his three-year old son, Fatai, who has been diagnosed with celebral palsy, and is in the throes of death. Cerebral Palsy by the way is strange situation, where a child is neither able to talk, sit, stand nor even eat properly, but only roll on the bed or floor.

    According to Wikipedia, it ‘is caused by an abnormal development or damage to the parts of the brain that control movement, balance and posture.’  Often, the problem occur during pregnancy, during childbirth or shortly after birth, but causes remain largely unknown, leaving doctors to hazard guesses at premature birth and some infections suffered by mothers during pregnancy, as risk factors.

    Due to its strangeness, the elder Owolabi took the condition for a spiritual one, taking his son from one spiritual healer to the other until a friend told him it is a health condition and that he should go to a proper hospital.

    So now, he needs N4.8million to go to India and access proper definitive treatment.

    Pain of a Nation

    Even as there does not seems to be any accurate statistics that one can quote, since a good number of Nigerians suffering from the above diseases have died without going to the proper treatment channels, while others still wallow in their predicament, waiting to die in their homes, due to poverty, Lagos State Commissioner for Health, Dr. Jide Idris said in a recent interview that the World Health Organisation’s declaration in 2012 that non-communicable diseases led by cardiovascular and renal diseases have attained epidemic proportion globally, suffices.

    Almost on a daily basis, Nigerians wake up to read or watch on TV how their compatriots, even celebrities have to debase themselves to go cap in hand in public, seeking financial help to access treatment for their cardiac, renal or even cancer-related diseases.

    Prince Ifeanyi Dike, who incidentally is also chairman board of trustees of the actors Guild of Nigeria recalled how his wife had to jettison shyness and go public after they had virtually ran out of every cash they could squeeze, treating his nagging kidney illness. According to him, for such illnesses, it really does not matter how much money one has, because it is expensive to manage or treat, and at the same time, the victim is no longer able to make more money.

    To make matters worse, Nigeria, with all the petro-dollars and resources at her disposal has been unable to institute and develop adequate health facility, causing gravely sick Nigerians to always have to travel to India, Europe or America.

    It is instructive to note here that even almighty America with its advanced facilities still loses a great number of its citizens to these ailments.

    According to the American Heart Association, cardiovascular diseases, led by Heart diseases and stroke remain the top two killers in the country. A more specific figure claimed that it lost over 787 of its citizens to heart disease, stroke and other cardiovascular diseases in 2010; which is about one in every three deaths in America.

    In the same vein, the National Kidney Foundation of America, said that with 47,000 American deaths caused by kidney disease in 2013, the disease is the 9th leading cause of death in the country. The body also says one out of every three American adult is at risk of kidney disease and that  wait for this, black Americans are 3 times more likely to experience kidney failure. This is probably to say that the black man is more predisposed to the disease. It also kind of tally with the various medical guess that change in lifestyle and diet are major causative factors, since the genealogical composition of people of this race was never designed for the kind of diets and lifestyles they suddenly found themselves living.

    Above all, the World Health Organisation’s declaration in its recent report that the burden of diabetes and cardiovascular disease will have increased by 130% in Africa by 2020, calls for great concerns.

    Lagos State to the rescue

    Wednesday March 18 witnessed the historic commissioning of the Cardiac and Renal Centre in Gbagada, Lagos, by His Excellency, Governor Babatunde Raji Fashola (SAN). In his commissioning remarks, the governor said “Year on year, I watched as we exported Nigerians abroad, with family members to care for and support them; all at high cost in foreign exchange, because there was no local alternative.”

    Continuing, he said his government between 2008 and 2014, sponsored 42 cardiac cases and 28 renal cases abroad for treatment abroad at tax-payers’ expense on the recommendation of the Ministry of health. And this is in spite of the fact that the country has well over 20,000 experts scattered across the globe and working to serve other societies, while their own people waste away, for lack of adequate facilities.

    He had also interacted with some of them and discovered that “they wanted to come home and practice but there were no hospitals comparable to where they were accustomed to working.”

    So he took a decision to do something.

    The turning point for him however was when a former president of the country had to be flown to Saudi Arabian hospital to manage a kidney ailment.

    The commissioning of the facility, six years after it was kicked off in 2008 was therefore a fulfilment of that promise. He therefore congratulated the team that put it together, and indeed the Nigerian people, while inviting them to take advantage of the facility.

    According to the governor, the hospital “has 24 dialysis bed stations, 20 beds for recovery and general ward use, 2 high dependency wards with five beds each for patient who have come out of intensive care, five beds for patients in intensive care, four post surgery beds, two post cathlab beds and two surgical theatres built to the most contemporary; along with instant multimedia equipment for live transmission to students in the lecture rooms.

    He also declared that the centre is being managed through concession partnership by Renescor Team, a multidimensional consortium of specialised Nigerian and American doctors and nurses who are cardiac and kidney specialists in America.

  • Succor for residents as Lagos unveils cardiac and renal centre

    Succor for residents as Lagos unveils cardiac and renal centre

    The opening of a cardiac and renal centre by the Lagos State government may signal the end of overseas treatment for Nigerians suffering from heart attack and similar health challenges. MIRIAM EKENE-OKORO reports.

    Not a few lives have been lost in Nigeria due to unavailability of modern health facilities and competent personnel to treat certain complicated diseases. While a few who could afford it travel overseas to seek medical attention for such health challenges as heart and kidney related diseases, thousands of others, helpless, are left to agonise over their conditions either praying for miracle healing or waiting patiently for death.

    One of such was Ms Bisi Oladele (not real name) a school teacher in one of the private school in Lagos State. Highly loved by the students and school management because of her hard work and commitment that had seen many students graduate from the school in good grades, her dreams of pursuing a career in teaching was cut short by a disease that was difficult to treat in our clime.

    As she battled with the problem later diagnosed as cardiac arrest, she had the hope that she could live longer to realise her dream if only she has access to treatment, but this was not to be as she eventually lost the battle for lack of access to funds to seek treatment outside the shores of the country.

    All that experiences by many Nigerians, observers say would be a thing of the past with the unveiling of a Cardiac and Renal Centre at the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital Annex in the Gbagada axis of the state.

    The facility which was designed to handle heart and kidney related disease also offers out-patient services, diagnostic services, ultrasound, CT scan, Echocardiography, Stress Electrocardiography, laboratory services, fluoroscopy, ocular investigation for complications from hypertension, diabetes and renal conditions, haemo -dialysis for acute and chronic kidney diseases with 24 dialysis machine, admission for all cardiac conditions that requires hospital stay, critical care in intensive care unit (ICU) and high dependency wards, cardiac catherization, non invasive cardiology, open heart surgery, renal surgery, nursing and diabetic services, rehabilitation services and corporate wellness program.

    The contract to build the health facility was awarded in 2008 to Messrs Deaux project Limited, and it was completed with the capacity for  67-bed centre that sits on 2,317 square metres or24,792 square feet of land.

    The design provides access to all floors by two bed lifts and a wide ramp which allows two trolleys to pass simultaneously. Fire/service stairways are provided at the side of the elevator and at the back of the building.

    To manage the project, the Lagos State Government signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Renescor Health Limited Liability Partnership to run and manage the facility under a 5-year Operation and Management (O&M) concession renewable for another five year term subject to satisfactory performance and mutual agreement of the parties wherein the proponent will provide all of the healthcare services and total facilities management required for the value-engineering Renal and Cardiac Centre.

    At the signing of the agreement, Lagos State Commissioner for Health, Dr. Jide Idris, noted that the government considered it appropriate and timely to have a befitting cardiac and renal centre due to the increasing number of patients presenting with end stage renal failure.

    Idris who explained that cardiac and renal disease constituted a growing health burden globally, said there is what is called a triple jeopardy in the health sector, especially in Lagos and Nigeria which require efforts of stakeholders in State health system to address.

    According to him, “We have what we call double jeopardy but now it is triple jeopardy in the sense that we do not only have problems with communicable diseases, we are now having problems with non-communicable diseases, and the third one has to do with mental health. But this project is trying to address the major aspect of the non-communicable disease burden.

    “Not only that, we also do know that these two-disease burden jointly cause serious complications in people who have these problems; and once you have these problems, you have them for live if they are not properly treated”, Idris explained.

    He said government had over the years earmarked, as part of its free health policy, quite a huge chunk of its budget to sponsor people abroad on various medical problem that could not be treated in the country where the needed expertise and facilities were not available, saying that it was the copulation of these factors that prompted the government to build the cardiac and renal centre.

    “A copulation of these factors prompted the need for us to build facilities locally, find a way of staffing them locally to provide the needed services to treat people of these ailments, reduce the number of money we are spending to sponsor people abroad, and more importantly to build local capacity,” he added.

    Idris also opined that setting up of the facility would help bring back home Nigerian medical specialists as a way of ‘brain gain’ to defeat the ‘brain drain’ phenomenon, lamenting that over the years, quite a number of indigenous medical personnel had left the country for greener pastures due to lack of infrastructure and facilities they could exhibit their skills with.

    “We have over 2,000 specialists in the United States, similar number in Europe and Canada. And this is one way of brain gain instead of brain drain because if you establish a facility with the right equipment and infrastructure, we can use that to attract the specialists abroad back home where they can exhibit their expertise and at the same time build local capacity here. That was the basic underlining reason why we decided to embark on this project.”

    He noted that the need to get a suitably qualified competent consortium that has the needed requirement to run the facility prompted the state to opt for a Public-Private Partnership, PPP, agreement through the office of Public-Private Partnership, adding that this aim resulted in the appointment of Renescor Health Limited Liability Partnership to run and manage the facility.

    Commissioner for Finance, Mr. Ayo Gbeleyi said that the reason for opting for qualified competent consortium of medical professionals to manage the facility through a PPP initiative was due to dearth of appropriate competent staff in this environment and the highly specialized nature of the equipment and services to be rendered within the facility.

    He said that the PPP office was quite convinced of the capabilities of the private managers, as they were expected to provide quality services in line with international best practices, promote medical tourism, provide training field to develop the capacity of state’s own health personnel and facilitate a gradual paradigm shift on dependence on foreigners with the skilled empowerment of local professionals.

    The Managing Director of Renescor Health Limited Liability Partnership, Dr. Ladi Awosika commended the government for building the state-of-the-art facility which he described as first of its kind in Sub-Saharan Africa taking out South Africa and Angola.

    He added that the Cardiac and Renal Centre has been built to very good specification as attested to by the specialists that had signed up with the company, saying that the centre has facility for telemedicine which would make every procedure going on in this facility to be reviewed by colleagues anywhere in the world, thereby ensuring that training and cutting edge facility therapy would be available at the facility.

    Awosika explained that Messrs Renescour comprise mainly of Nigerians specialists who had been in the Diaspora and could not get any space to work in Nigeria, noting that when they saw what was on ground, they pledged to contribute their quota through the facility.

    “As at today, we have about 200 Nigerian specialists who have signed on to be a part of this. Some of them have decided that it will not even be for money, rather they will take one or two week vacation to be at this centre to impact their knowledge and skills to the people of Lagos in particular and Nigeria in general,” he said.

    Awosika noted that more facilities of the magnitude of the cardiac and renal centre is required in the State to be able to satisfy the demand of its more than 21 million residents and promote medical tourism in Lagos, pledging that his company would not let the State down.

  • How my brother died of cardiac arrest, by Jonathan

    How my brother died of cardiac arrest, by Jonathan

    President Goodluck Jonathan yesterday explained that his younger brother, Chief Meni Innocent Jonathan, died of cardiac arrest.

    Speaking shortly after the funeral service at the St. Stephens Church Otuoke, the president said that his late brother appeared frail during his last private visit to his country home, prompting him to ask him to follow him to Abuja for treatment.

    In an emotion laden voice he disclosed that the late Meni even drove himself to Government House, Yenagoa where he joined him in his helicopter.

    He noted that his younger brother walked to his house unaided in Abuja and that there was no sign that he was going to die suddenly.

    “What worries me is that he died so suddenly. This was a young man. I came home on a Friday, he came to my house, no body carried him, he moved down just from his house across the road. We discussed, he was a bit frail, I said he should follow us so that he could do medical check up. He drove down to Yenagoa to board the Chopper to Abuja”.

    He added that “He got to Abuja that Saturday so he was admitted in the hospital. The following Monday I said let us make arrangement to get him out to let him get treatment outside. So an arrangement was being made, unfortunately he had cardiac arrest and inflamed heart at the State House Clinic. We were making arrangement to move him to National Hospital.

    “It is, very sad thing he has been covering the home front for us. He was a very humble person, he was a reliable and trustworthy person that you can ask to handle things for you. He is dead, there is nothing we can do.”

    While thanking all for coming to share the grief with the family, he noted that though by tradition he was not supposed to bury his younger one, the community is not strict with such traditions .

    “I must thank all of you who have come to join the Jonathan family to give us this respect, in some traditions I’m not supposed to be in church. It is tradition that you don’t bury your younger ones, luckily for this community we don’t have too many of these cultural and traditional things.”

    Bishop James James Oruwori, Bishop of the Anglican Church Ogbia Diocese, in his sermon, while describing death as a separation from the physical world to the spiritual, noted that there is life after death.

    “Our period on earth is a period of probation, it is time for preparations, how are we prepared for life after death. Where you will be is determined by your preparations on earth? How prepared are you is what matters,” he added.

    Governors present at the funeral service included the host Governor Seriake Dickson, Governor Rotimi Amaechi of Rivers, Emmanuel Uduaghan (Delta) Theodore Orji (Abia) and others.