AbstractIn recent years, we have observed a widespread deficiency in essential nutrients, most notably vitamin D, B12, and calcium, across all age groups. This has led to an increase in chronic diseases and mortality rates among adults. Consequently, we have investigated the causes of these deficiencies and sought to develop preventative, therapeutic, and awareness-raising strategies to mitigate this phenomenon and reduce the prevalence of these nutrient deficiencies among adults. The results showed that vitamin D deficiency was the most common (~58.1%) in both sexes, specifically (56.25 %) in males and (59.26%) in females. This was followed by calcium deficiency (48.96%) in males and (54.81%) in females, and vitamin B12 deficiency (16.5%) in males and (11.01%) in females. This study involved collecting random samples of vitamin D, B12, and calcium test results from routine health records of medical laboratories in Gharyan and its suburbs for 704 adults aged between 40 and 80 years, and estimating the prevalence of these vitamin deficiencies. A general paper questionnaire was administered to 100 adults to identify their financial and social status, the most common chronic diseases they suffer from, the types of vitamins they are deficient in, and the methods used to treat this deficiency, 55% of participants reported using dietary supplements. Then we selected 7 adults who had a severe vitamin deficiency under study, and we carried out therapeutic and nutritional interventions and introduced a separate dietary regimen consisting of dried figs and olive oil. These cases were followed up for a period of 3 to 4 months, and the rate of increase in these vitamins and the percentage of all cases were recorded. We found that the greatest improvement was observed in the case that relied on the use of dried figs and olive oil. The results showed a significant increase in both vitamin D and B12 levels. We also noted that the elevated iron stores (ferritin) in the blood results were associated with increased vitamin D levels. In addition, most cases that relied on supplements, injections, or tablets showed a significant increase in vitamin D levels.

ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــAbstract

The ABO blood group system is one of the most clinically important blood group systems and has been implicated in the susceptibility to various diseases, including cardiovascular and renal disorders. However, the relationship between ABO blood groups and chronic kidney disease remains controversial and has been insufficiently investigated in Libyan populations. This study aimed to determine the distribution of ABO and Rh blood groups among patients undergoing maintenance hemodialysis in western and southern Libya and to evaluate whether specific blood groups are overrepresented in this patient population. A cross-sectional descriptive study was conducted on 120 patients with end-stage renal disease receiving maintenance hemodialysis between 2021 and 2025. Participants were recruited from four dialysis centers in Libya, namely Misrata Medical Center, Gharyan Teaching Hospital, Brak General Hospital, and Bouzayan Gharyan Center. The patients' ages ranged from 20 to 80 years. ABO and Rh blood groups were determined using standard hemagglutination techniques. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and the chi-square test, with statistical significance considered at p < 0.05. Of the 120 patients enrolled, 58 (48.33%) were males and 62 (51.67%) were females. Blood group O was the most prevalent blood type, accounting for 45.83% of cases, followed by blood groups A (30.83%), B (19.17%), and AB (4.17%). Similar distribution patterns were observed in both male and female patients. No statistically significant differences in ABO blood group distribution were detected between genders (p > 0.05). Blood group O was the predominant ABO phenotype among hemodialysis patients in western and southern Libya, followed by groups A, B, and AB. The observed distribution pattern appears to reflect the general ABO blood group distribution commonly reported in the region, and no evidence of a significant association between a specific blood group and end-stage renal disease was identified. Further large-scale case-control studies involving healthy controls are recommended to clarify the potential role of ABO blood groups in chronic kidney disease.