Brava: Doctor warns of the need to adopt healthy lifestyles to promote and prevent chronic diseases

The director of the Fogo e Brava health region, Liziana Barros, warned today of the need for people to adopt healthy lifestyles to promote and prevent chronic non-communicable diseases.

This alert was made in declarations to Inforpress, at the end of a health fair held today in Nova Sintra, organized by the Brava Health Department, in partnership with Emprofac and the Austrian company Med Trust, with the aim of bringing health to streets, but also to alert society about chronic diseases.

According to the same source, various activities were carried out at this fair, such as measuring and controlling diabetes, hypertension, cholesterol, uric acid, HIV screening tests, nursing and medical consultations.

They also took the opportunity to carry out a series of awareness campaigns, as well as the dissemination of devices and services that allow people to control these pathologies at home.

As for holding the fair in Eugénio Tavares Square, the doctor emphasized that this is a way of getting closer to the community, justifying that people feel more comfortable approaching, as they often have some difficulty in approaching the Police Station Brava Health.

“Being in the square, people are curious and able to participate more and this is already a factor considered to be positive, since it allows people to know how they are in terms of health and awareness alerts them to have a more proactive attitude” , he underlined.

On the situation of the chronically ill, he stressed that the strongest point, before prevention, is promotion, explaining that from a young age one should have healthy styles, take care of the body, in order to avoid reaching chronicity.

The health professional warned that once there is a chronic disease, prevention is no longer possible, and the solution is to remedy it.

For chronic patients, he stressed that it is necessary to try to have a healthy lifestyle, practice physical exercise, maintain hypertension control, control blood sugar, and not forget that the follow-up must be done at least every three months.

In cases of Cardiovascular Accidents (CVA), since in Brava in recent times some young people have already suffered a CVA and with sequelae, the doctor explained that it is something multifactorial and that sometimes, in young people, it can be due to congenital issues, an aneurysm that can break and when it does, there's not much you can do about it.

But, he argued that there are things that can be done, such as a healthy lifestyle, physical exercise, healthy and balanced eating, leaving toxic habits aside, which is a bigger problem.

On the part of the Med Trust, José Marques explained that the aim of having participated in the fair is to make people start to give more importance and attention to chronic diseases, so that they are diagnosed at an early stage.

With an early diagnosis, he stressed that it is possible to minimize problems in the future, listing diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, problems linked to uric acid, among others that must be controlled in a more continuous and effective way.

On the part of the Health Department, the head nurse, Sónia Tavares, made a “positive assessment” of the activity, adding that they attended to around 130 patients, distributed in the various specialties of care.

The population considered initiatives of this type to be “commendable”, to bring health to the streets, not only for the consultations and screening tests carried out, but mainly for the information that was passed on about chronic diseases.