Communication media and cardiovascular health promotion as factors in sustainable development in Nigeria.

This study adopts Meta-synthesis as its research methodology. This involves theories, grand narratives, generalisations, and interpretive translations produced from the integration or comparison of findings from past qualitative studies. It enlarged the interpretative possibilities of findings and constructed larger narratives. In all, this study discovered that though the communication media possess considerable power to inform, educate and influence behaviour change, this power is limited in a heterogeneous nation like Nigeria where the populations are diverse along ethnicity, culture, religion, language and political lineage. Limiting people’s access to cardiovascular health information could expose them to risk factors which often resulted in high mortality rate and heighten health-care cost with grave implications on sustainable development. The youths who should have contributed to development process can be lost to CVD while resources that could aid infrastructural upgrading goes into the health care budget. The study concludes that to achieve effective mass media campaign against unhealthy habits that contribute to CVD prevalence in Nigeria, community media is the way forward.