Stroke has been identified as the leading cause of deaths at the Eastern Regional Hospital, followed by Hypertension, Premature births and Pneumonia, says the Medical Director of the hospital, Dr Arko Akoto Ampaw.
Otherwise known as Cerebral Vascular Accident (CVA), the disease was the cause of 183 deaths in 2023 representing an increase in deaths of 9.8 per cent of number of deaths as against 157 deaths recorded in 2022, representing 8.6 per cent, while it also accounted for 178 deaths in 2021 representing 11.3 per cent.
Dr Akoto Ampaw made these known during the 2023 Annual Performance Review meeting in Koforidua, the Eastern Regional capital, on Friday.
The Medical Director indicated that there had been a shift in the pattern of mortality from communicable diseases to non-communicable diseases, where people were not dying from communicable diseases like malaria, HIV but rather lifestyle or non- communicable diseases such as hypertension, diabetes and related issues of obesity taking front burner cause of high mortality.
“The underlying cause of stroke has to do with the lifestyle causes such as hypertension and diabetes, and these two diseases are the leading cause of organ damage like chronic kidney failure,” he said.
He blamed CV/Stroke ranking as the top cause of death at the hospital to the fact that people did not come in early to report the disease by adding that the danger was that majority were unaware of its existence.
“The fact that majority of people are not aware does not mean that they have not heard about CV/Stroke but it means that they have not been screened,” he explained, also he added that a lot of people did not check their blood pressure and did not visit the hospital regularly thinking that they were fit.
He said “It is the reason people just collapse or may go and sleep and do not wake up, among other instances where people normaly say there was nothing wrong with the person. Hypertension is a silent killer and you will not know you have hypertension until you have complications of it.”
Dr Akoto Ampaw further indicated that it was easy to check for blood pressure to know if a person had hypertension or diabetes and stated that once checked, the individual would be given anti-hypertensive medication to control the blood pressure.
He advised the public to ensure that they visit the hospital frequently to check their blood pressures and eat healthy food in order to avoid been attacked by CV/ Stroke, adding that by that the recording of such high numbers as a top cause of death would be reduced.
However, HIV did not feature in the top causes of deaths or admissions, Dr Akoto Ampaw stated that it could be attributed to people taking the anti-retroviral drugs seriously and urged them to continue to be able to eradicate HIV related deaths in the country
FROM AMA TEKYIWAA AMPADU AGYEMAN, KOFORIDUA
