Since the 1990s, children of the Gbagyi tribe in Northern Nigeria have been suffering severe rickets with an incidence of up to 40% in the children's generation. The disease seems to be prevalent in an area of approximately 100 km(2) south-east of Kaduna. According to broad medical studies in that area, there is no evidence for a genetic disposition but for a nutritional cause of the disease. A lack of calcium was found in blood and was calculated to originate from diet. We therefore checked parent material, soil, maize cobs (Zea mays) and drinking water for their specific Ca contents from a region with rickets problem (study area A) and compared the results to Ca amounts in similar samples from a region where rickets is unknown among the Gbagyi population (study area B). It thereby became apparent that there are no differences in mineralogical composition of the parent material between the study areas, but that Ca contents in soil, maize cobs and drinking water are 47.6%, 26.6%, respectively, 79.1% lower in study area A compared to study area B. This result suggests that there may indeed be a nutritionally and/or environmentally influence on rickets disease. Nevertheless, further research on this topic is required.
Case numbers of endemic Ca-deficiency rickets (CDR) have been reported to be alarmingly rising among children of subsistence farms in developing countries within the last 30 years. Fluoride toxicities in the environment are known to not be related to the disease. To investigate if, instead, CDR is caused by a nutrient deficiency in the environment, subsistence farms in an endemic CDR area near Kaduna, northern Nigeria, were investigated for bedrock, slope forms, soil types, and soil characteristics. The natural environment was investigated according to the World Reference Base, soil texture was analysed by pipette and sieving, and plant-available macronutrients were determined using barium-chloride or Ca-acetate-lactate extraction. The analyses showed that granite and slope deposits were the dominant parent materials. The typical slope forms and soil types were Lixisols and Acrisols on pediments, Fluvisols in river valleys, and Plinthosols and Acrisols on plains. Compared with West African background values, all of the soils had normal soil textures but were low in macronutrients. Comparisons to critical limits, however, showed that only the P concentrations were critically low, which are typical for savanna soils. A link between nutrient deficiency in soils and CDR in the Kaduna area was therefore considered unlikely.
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