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Trends of non-communicable diseases and public health concerns of the people of northeastern Nigeria amidst the Boko Haram insurgency

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Abstract

Background

The ongoing Boko Haram insurgency in northeastern Nigeria has depleted the country’s capability to deliver quality healthcare to her citizenry. The ailing health sector is overwhelmed with a rising incidence and prevalence of infectious and non-communicable diseases.

Aim

The aim of this paper was to determine the trend of kidney disease, end-stage renal disease (ESRD), anaemia, malnutrition and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in northeastern Nigeria.

Materials and methods

Data covering different periods between 1999 and 2017 were obtained from the University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital (UMTH), Maiduguri in northeastern Nigeria. This hospital is the largest tertiary healthcare facility in the region. The data were demographic in nature, i.e. sex, age or simply the registered cases. A quadratic model of time-series analysis was used to create the various trends of the respective diseases with the aid of Minitab software (version 18.0). t-Tests and analysis of variance (ANOVA) were also performed, with a p-value of less than or equal to 0.05 being considered significant.

Results

About three out of every five patients treated for kidney disease were male, while three out of every five patients treated for HIV were female. Patients between the ages of 31 and 50 years were at the greatest risk of developing kidney disease. The mean distribution of disease incidence was the same for both sexes for kidney disease, anaemia, malnutrition and HIV. The mean distribution disease incidence was different between age groups for kidney disease but the same for anaemia. The incidence of anaemia and malnutrition reported was almost the same for both sexes. Children under the age of 10 years old were at the most risk of anaemia, with the distribution decreasing with increasing age. The trend analysis of the incidence of kidney disease, ESRD, anaemia and malnutrition showed that these ailments were on the increase, while the number of patients that were on antiretroviral therapy (ART) was on the decline in northeastern Nigeria.

Conclusion

These increasing trends are evidences of the effect of Boko Haram on the public health of the people of northeastern Nigeria and will continue to be a public health concern for the region and the country as a whole.

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Data availability

The data were included in the paper.

Abbreviations

MAPE:

Mean absolute percent error

MAD:

Mean absolute deviation

MSD:

Mean square deviation

ANOVA:

Analysis of variance

p :

p-Value

t :

t-Value

DF:

Degrees of freedom

SSE:

Sum of square error

MSE:

Mean square error

f-crit:

F criteria or tabulated

F:

F calculated

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Acknowledgements

The authors appreciate the efforts of the anonymous reviewers toward this publication. We also thank the management of the University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital for making the data available.

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Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Contributions

PIA conceived the idea, brought the data and worked on the discussion. HIO performed the confirmatory data analysis. IA carried out the descriptive data analysis and sourced the literature. CI worked on the methodology, results and discussion sections.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hilary I. Okagbue.

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Research involving human participants

Not applicable. No experiment was performed on animal or human subject(s).

Conflict of interest

None declared.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from the University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital.

Confidentiality

The data that contain detailed profiles were not obtained from the hospital. Only the data on the sex and total number of patients were made available to the authors.

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Adamu, P.I., Okagbue, H.I., Akinwumi, I. et al. Trends of non-communicable diseases and public health concerns of the people of northeastern Nigeria amidst the Boko Haram insurgency. J Public Health (Berl.) 29, 553–561 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10389-019-01157-2

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