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Background: Hyperglycemia in pregnancy (HIP) is a common medical complication during pregnancy and is associated with several short and long-term maternal-fetal consequences. We aimed to determine the prevalence and factors associated with HIP among Ugandan women.

Methods: We consecutively enrolled eligible pregnant women attending antenatal care at Kawempe National Referral Hospital, Kampala, Uganda in September 2020. Mothers known to be living with diabetes mellitus or haemoglobinopathies and those with anemia (hemoglobin <11g/dl) were excluded. Random blood sugar (RBS) and glycated hemoglobin A1c (HbA_1c) were measured on peripheral venous blood samples. HIP was defined as an HbA1c ≥5.7% with its subsets of diabetes in pregnancy (DIP) and prediabetes defined as HbA1c_1c of ≥6.5% and 5.7–6.4% respectively. ROC curve analysis was performed to determine the optimum cutoff of RBS to screen for HIP.

Results: A total of 224 mothers with a mean (±SD) age 26±5 years were enrolled, most of whom were in the 2^nd or 3^rd trimester (94.6%, n=212) with a mean gestation age of 26.6±7.3 weeks. Prevalence of HIP was 11.2% (n=25) (95% CI: 7.7–16.0). Among the mothers with HIP, 2.2% (n=5) had DIP and 8.9% (n=20) prediabetes. Patients with HIP were older (28 years vs. 26 years, p=0.027), had previous tuberculosis (TB) contact (24% vs. 6.5%, p=0.003) and had a bigger hip circumference (107.8 (±10.4) vs. 103.3 (±9.7) cm, p=0.032). However only previous TB contact was predictive of HIP (odds ratio: 4.4, 95% CI: 1.2–14.0; p=0.022). Using HbA_1c as a reference variable, we derived an optimum RBS cutoff of 4.75 mmol/L as predictive of HIP with a sensitivity and specificity of 90.7% and 56.4% (area under the curve=0.75 (95% CI: 0.70–0.80, p<0.001)), respectively.

Conclusions: HIP is common among young Ugandan women, the majority of whom are without identifiable risk factors.

Prior work underscores the important role of customer advocacy for brands. The purpose of this study is to explore the critical role customers can play as brand heroes. The authors developed and validated a measurement scale composed of properties that are derived from distinct brand hero motivational mechanisms.

The authors conducted one exploratory pilot, using semi-structured interviews, with industry and academic experts, and employed three main studies across varying brands and market settings.

This study explores and empirically demonstrates how the brand hero scale (BHS) is related to, yet distinct from, existing scales of opinion leaders, market mavens, attachment and customer advocacy. The six-item BHS demonstrates convergent, discriminant, nomological and predictive validity across several different brand contexts.

This research extends the extant body of work by identifying and defining brand heroes, developing and validating a parsimonious BHS, and demonstrating how its predictive validity extends both to a range of key advocacy and loyalty customer behaviors.

The study provides provocative insights for marketing researchers and brand managers and ascertains the important role heroes may play for brands in terms of strong customer advocacy and loyalty behaviors.

Building on the theory of meaning, this study shows that identifying and working with brand heroes is of great managerial importance and offers critical avenues for future research.

This study answers the call for research and theorising exploring ethical communication and brand risk from the African continent. The study's purpose was to identify the challenges that strategic communication practitioners face in enacting ethical crisis communication in South Africa.

The researchers conducted ten in-depth interviews with South African strategic communication professionals.

The dominant theme emerging from the study is the marginalisation and exclusion of the communication function in decision-making during crisis situations. Communicators were viewed as implementers, technicians and not strategic counsel. The protection of organisational reputation was done at the expense of the ethics and moral conscience of practitioners. Practitioners were viewed and deployed as spin doctors and tools to face unwanted media interactions.

The article sheds light on the concepts of ethical communication and decision-making in a multicultural African context using the moral theory of Ubuntu and strategic communication. It demonstrates the tension professionals experience as they toggle between unethical capitalist approaches and African values. The practitioner's role as organisational moral conscience is hindered, suppressed and undermined by organisational leadership's directives to use opaque, complex communication, selective transparency and misrepresentation of facts.