Houston-based gastroenterologist offers to help ailing Nigerian President

The past eight weeks or so has not been easy for Africa’s (media-baptized) giant, the Federal Republic of Nigeria. The oil-soaked West African region has just been grappling with uncertainty over its ailing president Alhaji Yisa Musa Yar’Adua grounded in obscurity, when along came this 23-year-old citizen Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to be charged by a federal criminal court with attempting to destroy a Northwest Airlines aircraft on its final approach into the Detroit Metropolitan Airport on Christmas Day and with placing a destructive device on the aircraft.

President Yar’Adua is sick and has been grounded for more than one month at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital & Research Centre - a well known hospital in medical artistry in Saudi Arabia. But Mr. President’s ordeal did not just start overnight. In April 2007, International Guardian revealed an unconfirmed diagnosis suggesting that Yar’Adua, then a presidential candidate, may not make it through his first term if elected. He was battling with symptoms to include severe puffiness around the eyes, swelling of the legs, sometimes of the whole body, and a burning sensation while urinating. It was also gathered that “Severe pain in his back and high blood pressure often has created some increasing weakness that makes his ability to perform official duties almost impossible.”

President Yar’Adua’s illness perseveres with a damaging velocity, causing more harm to the functionality of his major organs and grounding his physical ability to perform his official responsibilities. The recent medical review and tests undertaken at this hospital have confirmed the initial diagnosis that the president is indeed suffering from acute constrictive pericarditis, a disorder caused by inflammation of the pericardium, the sac-like covering of the heart.

As such, thickening, scarring, and contraction of the pericardium occurs, causing it to be less elastic, preventing it from stretching, and resulting in reduced filling of the chambers of the heart. Worse still, this reduces the amount of blood pumped by the heart and causes blood to back up behind the heart, hence symptoms of heart failure.

By its editorial capacity, unraveling the political implications of this issue in its last edition wasn’t enough - International Guardian pursued the clinical dimensions beyond the fortified and secretive walls of the Saudi- based facility where the ailing president dwells and brought its enquiring template back to Houston, Texas, to explore other survival options.

The Hope Digestive & Liver Disease Clinic is a Northwest Houston treatment facility that is proficient in screening colonoscopy, billary and liver diseases, digestive disorders, and inflammatory bowel ailments. Medical director and practicing physician Dr. Steven Christopher Ugbarugba (Dr.Aruba) is one of thousands of Nigerian-born physicians scattered all over United States saving lives, but as a gastroenterologist, a special medicine that deals with digestive and liver diseases, his words emit every authority, undisputed confidence and credibility.

Dr. Aruba graduated from the University of Benin in 1988 and completed his internship in the same institution. He worked as a general practitioner in both government and private hospitals before returning to University of Benin teaching Hospital where he spent 3 years in the OBGYN department as a registrar. He did his internal medicine residency at the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta 1997 and proceeded to a three year fellowship at State University of New York where he specialized in gastroenterology .

Gastroenterology mainly deals with digestive and liver diseases, but Dr. Aruba’s specialization involves screening colonoscopy, evaluation of peptic ulcer disease, pancreas and gallbladder diseases, and evaluation of abdominal pain. He performs interventional gastroenterology procedures like Endoscopic Retrograde Cholangio pancreatography (ERCP) and Endoscopic ultrasound (EUS).”

“It is important to first define the underlying disease that Mr. President suffers from. He has Churg-Strauss syndrome (CSS) or allergic granulomatous angitis which is a rare syndrome that affects small to medium- sized arteries and veins first described in 1951 by Dr. Churg and Dr. Strauss. Now some of the known complications of the disorder are glomerulonephritis (kidney damage), which he has suffered from, and constrictive peicarditis,” Dr. Aruba told International Guardian.

Dr. Aruba said that, “Constrictive pericarditis, which is the current complication he is dealing with, occurs when a thickened fibrinous pericardium (The membrane covering the heart) prevents normal filling of the heart with blood, which eventually affects the output of blood by the heart. The prognosis very much depends on if it is subacute or chronic. Unfortunately, we are getting information from a general attorney and politicians, not from his doctors. It is known that about 9% of patients with acute pericarditis go on to develop Constrictive pericarditis.”

Dr. Aruba has seen many patients with a similar ailment and has the technicalities of both diagnosis and treatment enshrined in his finger tips. He spoke without irrelevant punctuations or even blinking his eyes, “Subacute constrictive pericarditis may respond to steroid and anti-inflammatory drugs if treated before periadial fibrosis occurs. However, chronic constrictive pericarditis requires surgery for survival.”

The recommended procedure, according to Dr. Aruba, is “complete pericardiectomy, which means to completely strip off the covering of the heart to remove the restriction and allow normal expansion and filling of the heart .” The surgical procedure can be long and is often technically complex. But Aruba suggested that “Complications of this procedure may include excessive bleeding, atrial and ventricular arrhythmia, and ventricular wall rupture. The surgical motility ranges from 5-15%.”

In one of our multiple conversations that ensued between this reporter and Dr. Aruba, President Yar’Adua’s chances of survival became an issue. Dr. Aruba said, “As I had mentioned earlier, we have been getting bits and pieces of information on Mr. President’s health for 6 weeks. It is an unfortunate situation for Nigerians to be in the dark about the president’s condition. We don’t even know if he underwent surgery on the heart, and if he is recovering, or if he had complications of surgery. We have not heard from his doctors or the president himself. In a civilized society, this never occurs. I remember President Bush was to undergo colonoscopy for two hours in 2005, and the whole world was informed . Power was officilally handed over to the Vice-President.”

Can Houston’s Hope Digestive & Liver Disease Clinic help the Nigerian President? According to Dr. Aruba, “Of course, we can save his life. However, after the president has made multiple trips from 2005-2010 for Medical care, we still don’t know what he went for specifically and what treatment was offered. It all boils down to honesty and accountability.”

Specifically, Dr. Aruba stated that “We can save Yar’Adua here if he comes clean. If Mr. President is brought in today as my patient , my first advice is to provide all information necessary to make a correct diagnosis and advise him to tell Nigerians what is his entire medical situation. He must come clean with the history of his illness”

Nigerian leaders are not new to strange illnesses as they shuttle all over the world seeking help while unable to revamp their own country’s health infrastructure. In the early 1980s, then President Babangida was diagnosed with a ruptured tissue in the knee region. He was flown to France where he spent weeks in a hospital bed. Former President Obasanjo frequented New York and major European cities during his tenure for physicals and sometimes for minor ailments. It may also be recalled that his wife, Stella died after a controversial plastic surgery. Just last month, former First lady Mrs. Babangida died in a Californian Hospital from ovarian cancer.

“This is sad and unfortunate,” said Aruba, “that our leaders have failed to equip our hospitals at home and they find pride in flying around the world seeking medical care when we have brilliant physicians at home that can care for them. I worked for 8 years after graduating from University of Benin both as a general practitioner and gynecologist in private and government settings. I believe Nigerian trained physicians are capable and can handle any medical situation if they are provided with modern diagnostic and therapeutic equipment. I can tell having worked as a physician in the United States for 15 years, Nigerian Doctors can compete anywhere in the world. I believe it is high time…that our leaders begin to put their priorities right .and stop wasting tax payers money in seeking medical care outside the shores of Nigeria.”

He said, “We gastroenterologists have even met at some point hoping to go back home on a rotational basis to provide specialized health care to our people, but we have not been able to identify a facility that will be most feasible. My advice for the Nigerian government or our acting leader is to first tell the truth, nothing but the truth, to the 140 million Nigerians waiting for an answers as well as to be open, honest and straight forward.”