Maintain healthy lifestyle to prevent CMDs - CREATE Ghana admonishes young people
CREATE Ghana, a National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) group on Cardiometabolic Diseases (CMDs) in Africa, has admonished young people to maintain healthy lifestyles to prevent CMDs.
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In an interview with the Daily Graphic last Thursday, the Lead Educator at CREATE Ghana, Dr Elizabeth Boateng, who doubles as a pharmacist, urged young people to “maintain a healthy diet and lifestyle, engage in regular physical activity, avoid tobacco and excessive alcohol consumption, manage stress and mental health and observe regular check-ups and screening” to prevent the risk of having CMD issues.
She said cases of CMDs had increased worldwide, as well as in Ghana, and had become a great course of concern since in the past, CMDs were prevalent among the aged but were now affecting young people.
She mentioned “hypertension, diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular diseases” as some of the predominant CMDs affecting both the aged and young people at high rates in recent years.
“According to recent statistics from the International Diabetes Federation (IDF), in 2022, 463 million people worldwide had diabetes. By 2030, this number is expected to rise to 578 million.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) reported that in 2022, an estimated 17.9 million people died from cardiovascular diseases.
Meanwhile, in Ghana, the Ghana Health Service (GHS) records over 200,000 cases of diabetes annually at the Outpatient Department of health facilities with a prevalence rate of between 2.6 per cent and nine per cent,” she said.
Education
The Lead Educator of CREATE Ghana said the global health research, which had other collaborators in Kenya, Mozambique and the United Kingdom (UK), aimed to evaluate and deliver a structured self-management education intervention for people living with cardiometabolic disease in collaboration with strategic institutions such as the Ghana College of Pharmacy, the GHS and the Ministry of Health.
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“CREATE is generating scientific evidence in a feasibility study that can inform healthcare providers and stakeholders when it comes to managing CMDs. The feasibility shows that this kind of research can be done here and the results are promising. However, we need to conduct a larger study to generate much more evidence to inform policymakers when it comes to managing CMD,” she said.
Dr Boateng underscored the importance of educating the public and clinicians on these conditions and their interplay with their diet and lifestyle which she said was a vital step towards change.
She added that the research findings would encourage stakeholders to take a different perspective in managing these conditions and open a window into looking at preventative rather than curative measures in reducing the burden of CMDs through lifestyle modification.
She appealed to the government and other policymakers to adopt policies based on the data provided by CREATE Ghana and allied institutions to make coherent decisions that would help in the delivery of better health care towards the prevention of CMDs.