Diabetes/Dementia in Sub-Saharian Africa and Nigerian Women in the Eye of Storm

Abstract

: In the next few years, the prevalence of diabetes mellitus (DM) is projected to dramatically increase globally, but most of the cases will occur in low-to-middle-income countries. Some of the major risk factors for diabetes accelerate the development of dementia in African-Americans, thus leading to a higher prevalence of dementia than Caucasians. Sub-Saharan Africa women have a disproportionately two-to-eight fold increased prevalence of dementia. In the eye of this storm, Nigeria holds the highest number of diabetics on the African continent, and its prevalence is rising in parallel to obesity, hypertension, and the population’s aging. The socio-economic impact of the rising prevalence of DM and dementia will be huge and unsustainable for the healthcare system in Nigeria, as has been recognized in developed economies. Here, we analyze the current situation of women's health in Nigeria and explore future perspectives and directions. The complex interplay of factors involved in diabetes and dementia in Nigerian women include key biological agents (metabolic syndrome, vascular damage, inflammation, oxidative stress, insulin resistance), nutritional habits, lifestyle, and anemia, that worsen with comorbidities. In addition, restricted resources, lack of visibility, and poor management result in a painful chain that increases the risk and burden of disease in Nigerian women from youth to elderly ages. Heath policies to increase the ra- tio of mental health professionals per number of patients, mostly in rural areas, foment of proactive primary care centers, and interventions targeting adolescents and adult women and other specific mothers-children pairs are strongly required for a sustainable development goal.

Psychological well-being and cognitive aging in Black, Native American, and White Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center participants

“…Evidence does suggest that these racial disparities are not fully explained by genetic or vascular risk factors (Mayeda et al, 2016;Chen and Zissimopoulos, 2018). This is not surprising; the importance of key environmental conditions such as educational experiences in global dementia burden and comorbid precursors such as diabetes has been well-documented (Oghagbon and Giménez-Llort, 2019;Livingston et al, 2020;Oghagbon et al, 2022). In the U.S., racial disparities in cognitive aging appear to be driven in large part by inequitably distributed social determinants of health including educational experiences and wealth (Sisco et al, 2015;Mayeda et al, 2016;Chen and Zissimopoulos, 2018) as well as resultant lifetime stress exposures (Zahodne et al, 2019;Zuelsdorff et al, 2020;Chen et al, 2022).…”