Comparison of serum levels of calcium and magnesium among preeclamptic and normotensive pregnant women at Nnamdi Azikiwe University Teaching Hospital, Nnewi, Nigeria

Background:Despite numerous studies, the exact aetiology of pre-eclampsia remains unknown. Some studies have shown that supplementation of calcium and magnesium could ameliorate the effects of pre-eclampsia. The objective of this study was to compare the calcium and magnesium levels in the serum of Nigerian women with or without pre-eclampsia.Methods:In this study, serum calcium and magnesium levels were determined using atomic absorption spectrometry in 54 patients and 48 healthy normotensive pregnant women. The mean, standard deviation, Student’s‘t’ test and Pearson correlation were employed.Results:Serum calcium was significantly lower in patients than controls (9.17 ± 0.6 vs. 7.22 ± 0.5 mg/dl. P <0.001) (t test). Plasma Magnesium was significantly lower in patients than controls 13.19 ± 1.1 vs. 9.81 ± 0.7 mg/dl. P <0.001). The systolic and diastolic blood pressure showed significant inverse correlation with both calcium and magnesium (P<0.01).Conclusion:There was significant reduction in the levels of calcium and magnesium in patients with pre-eclampsia. Dietary supplementation of these trace elements may help to prevent pre-eclampsia

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Awareness, practices, and prevalence of hypertension among rural Nigerian women

Background: High blood pressure is on the rise globally, affecting more women than men in many developing countries. It is the leading cause of mortality worldwide, and hospitalization in sub-Saharan Africa. Many known risk factors to hypertension, though prevalent in Nigeria, are controllable. Prevention, however, is difficult where there is poor awareness, attitude, and practices. Objectives: The study aims at determining the level of knowledge of hypertension and its associated factors, attitudes, practices, and prevalence among rural Nigerian women. Materials and Methods: Cross-sectional design was used to study 252 subjects in Sanga Local Government Area. Subject selection was by purposive and stratified sampling techniques. Data were collected using self-administered, semi-structured questionnaire after informed consents were obtained both verbally and in writing. Data were analyzed using SPSS statistical package. Level of significant was taken at 0.05. Results: Prevalence of hypertension was 24.2%. Average level of risk factor awareness was 65.4% with excessive salt intake (77.4%) being the most recognized. Asymptomatic nature of hypertension was recognized by 61.5% of the respondents, while 44.4% only knew the standard method for hypertension detection. While 17.5% strongly believed that hypertension can be managed effectively with drugs, it was only 9.1% that strongly disagreed that it could be caused by evil spirits. The average number of those with good preventive life style practices was 61.3%. Knowledge was associated with several factors and seems to affect practices (P < 0.05). Conclusion: Fair but inadequate level of knowledge and attitudes affected by several factors, as well as moderately high prevalence was recorded

Effect of free maternal health services on maternal mortality: An experience from Niger Delta, Nigeria

Background: Free maternal health care was launched by Delta State Government in 2007. This development was laudable as poverty has been identified as a big hindrance to accessing health care services among mothers in rural communities. There was need, however, to ascertain the effectiveness of this program. Aim: The study aimed at determining maternal mortality rate (MMR) from 2005 to 2009, its correlates, obstetric cause of death and to evaluate the effect of free maternal care on MMR. Methodology: MMRs were computed based on all maternal deaths and live births available in summary health report of Ika South local government area from 2005 to 2009. Correlational analysis was done to determine the correlates of MMRs. Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 16 (USA, 2007) was used in the analysis. Results: There was a reduction in MMR from 932/100,000 in 2005 to 604/100,000 in 2009. This reduction negatively correlated (r =−;0.74, P = 0.15) with an increase in antenatal care registration within the period. The gradual increase in proportion of child delivery in health facilities from 59% in 2007 to 74.6% (2288/3065) in 2009 negatively correlated (r =−;0.5, P = 0.4) with a reduction in MMR from 836/100,000 to 604/100,000. The number of skilled staff employed increased by 36.4% (51/140) since 2005 and negatively correlated (r =−;0.34, P = 0.56) with MMR reduction of 328/100,000 since that period, with the employment of nurses being the stronger correlate (r =−;0.48, P = 0.41). Hemorrhage (44%) was the leading obstetric cause of death. Conclusion: The study showed that MMR has been on a gradual downward trend since the introduction of free maternal health services in Delta State, Nigeria

Rising global burden of breast cancer: the case of sub-Saharan Africa (with emphasis on Nigeria) and implications for regional development: a review

Abstract Background Despite mortality from breast cancer in Africa being higher than in high income countries, breast cancer has not been extensively studied in the region. The aim of this paper was to highlight the rising burden of breast cancer with an emphasis on sub-Saharan Africa as well as trends, characteristics, controversies and their implications for regional development. Methodology A review of published studies and documents was conducted in Medline, Scopus, Pubmed and Google using combinations of key words-breast neoplasm, breast cancer, cancer, incidence, mortality, Africa, Nigeria. Graphical and frequency analyses were carried out on some of the incidence and mortality figures retrieved from published papers and the GLOBOCAN website. Findings Globally, about 25% and 15% of all new cancer cases and cancer deaths respectively among females were due to breast cancer. Africa currently had the highest age-standardized breast cancer mortality rate globally, with the highest incidence rates being recorded within the sub-Saharan African sub-region. Incidence trends such as inherently aggressive tumour and younger age profile had been subject to controversies. Certain factors such as westernized diet, urbanization and possibly increasing awareness had been implicated, though their specific contributions were yet to be fully established. Conclusion Unless urgent action is taken, breast cancer will compound sub-Saharan Africa’s disease burden, increase poverty and gender inequality as well as reverse the current global gains against maternal and neonatal mortality