Health

Socially isolated people may be more likely to develop diabetes than adults with closer ties to family and friends, a recent study suggests.

Loneliness has long been linked to a wide variety of physical and mental health problems, particularly among chronically ill and elderly people. With diabetes in particular, close friends and family can influence how patients eat, how much they exercise, and how well they keep the disease in check.

To see how these relationships may influence the odds of getting diabetes in the first place, researchers examined data on 2,861 adults who ranged in age from 40 to 75 and were 60 years old on average.

More than half of these people had normal blood sugar and no diagnosis of diabetes. But 430 people, or 15 percent, had slightly elevated blood sugar classified as “pre-diabetes,” while about 4 percent were newly diagnosed with diabetes when they joined the study and 24 percent already had the disease.

Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) has confirmed the deaths of up to 45 persons in an outbreak of yellow fever in the country which is currently active in states including Kwara, Kogi, Kano, Zamfara, Kebbi, Nasarawa and Niger.

Two Chinese-produced vaccines, a Bivalent Oral Poliomyelitis Vaccine (BOPV) and a Hepatitis “A” Vaccine (HAV), have received prequalification by the WHO. The move indicates that the WHO has given the vaccines its stamp of approval for the safety and efficacy, and UN procuring agencies may now source them.

Keto has been ranked last in the 2018 list of best diets by the US News and World Report, along with the relatively unknown Dukan diet.

Keto stresses eating a ton of protein and minimal carbs, putting the dieter into "ketosis," when the body breaks down both ingested and stored body fat into ketones, which it uses as energy. People on such diets often deal with fatigue and light-headedness as they adjust to a lack of carbohydrates.

Though the experts on the US News and World Report panel that created the list said eating that way isn't harmful short-term, they ranked the diets poorly on long-term weight loss success, ease of use and overall impact on health.

Women who undergo a hysterectomy are at greater risk for heart disease and other health issues -- even if they keep their ovaries, new research suggests.

"Hysterectomy is the second most common gynecologic surgery, and most are done for benign reasons because most physicians believe that this surgery has minimal long-term risks," said lead researcher Dr. Shannon Laughlin-Tommaso, of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.

"With the results of this study, we encourage people to consider nonsurgical alternative therapies for fibroids, endometriosis and prolapse, which are leading causes of hysterectomy," she said.

Cardiologists have raised new alarm concerning the increase of a certain kind of heart disease known as the hypertensive heart disease in hospitals across the federation.

An estimate of 5 in 8 brought-in patients who reported incidents of hypertension are said to be at risk of a late stage of cardiac shutdown.

A group of top cardiologists from major University Teaching Hospitals in the country, under the umbrella of the Heart Failure Technical Board (HFTB), expressed the worry at a recent media briefing held in Lagos, revealing that heart disease has become a major cause of death in the nation’s hospitals in recent times.