Dr Charles Ugwuanyi, Consultant Neurosurgeon and Chief Executive Officer of Wellington Neurology and Neurosurgery Hospital, Abuja, has warned that Nigeria is facing an escalating kidney health crisis with almost 9,000 new cases of end-stage kidney failure recorded monthly.
He called for urgent action on prevention, early diagnosis and better access to specialised care, according to The Guardian.
Also, the Vise Chancellor of the University of Medicine and Medical Sciences, Abeokuta, Prof Fatiu Arogundade, stated roughly 25.4 million adult Nigerians could be living with CKD.
Speaking to journalists in Abuja yesterday to mark the hospital’s 15th anniversary, Ugwuanyi said the reported monthly figure was frightening and called on Nigerians to take basic health checkups seriously instead of waiting for severe symptoms. Buy Maps
He lectured about prevention of renal disease and issues of giving specialised healthcare in Nigeria.
Hypertension, diabetes, excessive alcohol intake and the indiscriminate use of drugs were recognised as key risk factors that require more public awareness and intervention.
“The response of the country to kidney disease must be beyond social media campaigns and sensational commentary to practical measures that help to prevent illness, support the affected patients and improve access to treatment,” Ugwuanyi said.
“It is becoming an epidemic and the question is why is it so? The answer is not to make noise on social media. It is to find out what the challenges are and how you can help,” he said.
“There is a growing burden of kidney disease that requires a stronger culture of preventive health care especially among young Nigerians who may be living with high blood pressure or elevated blood sugar without knowing it,” he said. Buy Map
He was worried that many Nigerians, particularly the young adults, are not willing to go for routine medical checks, mostly because they feel healthy or assume that they will not be affected by major sickness.
Ugwuanyi called for Nigerians to include examinations of blood pressure and blood sugar in their routine health checks, noting that early detection will offer the patient the opportunity to treat the underlying disease before any permanent damage has been done.
Arogundade made the disclosure at the 430th Inaugural Lecture of the Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile Ife, Osun State titled ‘The Burden, Barriers, Bottlenecks and Breakthroughs in the Management of Kidney Disease in Nigeria: A Journey from the Grassroots to the Frontiers’.
Drawing on over 30 years of clinical practice and research, the don called kidney illness a “epidemic” and a huge public health concern, warning that Nigeria is in dire need of a concerted national response for prevention, early detection and inexpensive treatment.
He said Nigeria still does not have a national registry that would reveal the real incidence of CKD, adding that a peer-reviewed Nigerian study of 14,250 participants showed a pooled prevalence of 20.4 per cent.
He said extrapolating the data to the adult population, nearly 25.4 million Nigerians might be living with overt or covert CKD while about 127,000 could have progressed CKD or end-stage renal disease.
CKD has a different pattern of demography in Nigeria affecting many persons between 20 and 50 years unlike in developed countries where the disease is more common among the elderly, Arogundade said.
Hypertension and glomerulonephritis were the primary causes, although diabetes, HIV-associated nephropathy and obstructive kidney disease also contributed considerably, he said.
Other major contributions to the burden of kidney illness in Nigeria, the professor stated, were environmental exposures and sickle cell disease.
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