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[...] Atrial fibrillation is the most common heart rhythm disorder. One in four middle-aged adults in Europe and the US will develop atrial fibrillation. 2 It causes 20-30% of all strokes and raises the risk of premature death, but outlook improves dramatically with oral anticoagulation therapy. Undiagnosed atrial fibrillation is common and many patients remain untreated. Opportunistic screening is recommended in over-65s, but has time, logistical, and resource demands.
DIGITAL-AF examined the feasibility and effectiveness of screening for atrial fibrillation with a smartphone app medically certified in the EU to detect the condition. The app was made freely available by publishing an access token in a local newspaper. Within 48 hours, 12,328 adults had scanned the token and enrolled in the study.
Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180825081735.htm
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Tuesday August 28 2018, @12:23PM (3 children)
this is probably the most underated thing about those watches we all(?) wear.
Only by collection physical data every minute of the day, will we be able to predict (and treat) disorders.
Why is this program not directed at a thing that *actually* measures the heartrate?
It would probably be a better use of funds to by a skip load of cheap "fitbits" that just measure HR....
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday August 28 2018, @02:35PM (2 children)
Actually there are lots of things by which disorders are predicted and treated by, and constant collection is not necessary to the vast majority of them. Afib can be serious, certainly, but many people live with it for indefinite periods of time - it often isn't nearly as serious as ventricular fibrilation.
The program isn't directed at measuring heartrate because smartwatches already do that function - this is more like a single channel ECG. It's not the first to break ground in the field, either.
Monitoring HR alone says some things, but virtually nothing as a single datum about how your heart is actually functioning. Many people live perfectly normal lives with tachycardia or bradycardia. Supertachycardia will invariably produce symptoms and requires an ECG to know precisely what type of supertachycardic rhythm is being engaged (though SVT is most common). That's a medical emergency.
Me... I wonder what it does to your battery life to have a constantly running data recorder going. Maybe nothing. But battery life is utterly predicated on what is running, how often, and with what hardware consumption. My Fossil WristPDA used to require nightly charging with ordinary use and if I used the watch the way I now use my phone it would be dead before the workday was over.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Wednesday August 29 2018, @12:48PM (1 child)
as a "new to running" person, I have collected a couple of years of running HR data - via the chest strap. The patterns are clear of individual stress and performance.
The newer devices have more efficient monitors, and are starting to edge into days, even with constant monitoring.
My thought is, we don't know what we'll find until we do the experiment.
I'll guess we'll have to wait and see...
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday August 29 2018, @03:57PM
True. If it doesn't hurt to collect the data, collect the data! But you've also added a little and important bit - your data is collected while you're running. That says something more than "it's just a pulse rate" :) Where I was going at was that since Afib can happen even in an otherwise fine pulse (and it takes an ECG to detect them), it's a good indicator. Not necessarily a diagnosis.
But by all means, if you make sense out of the data you get, go for it!
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 28 2018, @12:26PM (1 child)
Does it link to insurance, medical and pharmaceutical companies? What's in it for the publisher if it is free?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 28 2018, @12:48PM
Maybe if it was developed in the US.
This was from a Belgian researcher and presented at the European Society of Cardiology. It doesn't even need a HR-monitoring watch.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday August 28 2018, @01:02PM
Just now I bookmarked a page where it's offering one of my drawings [warplife.com] absolutely free.
This one has me a little perplexed:
http://seminary278.web.fc2.com/college-education/1219-essay.html [fc2.com]
There's a site where you can pay them $4.99 to purchase any one of _my_ essays on mental illness and recovery [warplife.com].
Back in the day Scraper Sites were a widespread problem but Google has mostly beat them down. An effective way to determine whether one of your own pages has been jacked is to search for the verbatim text of a complete sentence out of the middle of one of your pages, in quotes.
While I mostly use relative links, here and there in each page I place an absolute URL to one of my site's pages. That will occasionally turn up clicks on scraper sites that have jacked my content without knowing to de-absolutize all the links it just put the arm on.
What A Wondrous Tool Google Is. Too bad they didn't take their own advice not to be evil [pixelbegone.org].
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday August 28 2018, @01:09PM (2 children)
-sure.
It's called "The Silent Killer" because there are _no_ symptoms of any sort before it destroys both your kidneys.
Us wingnuts get our blood pressures checked all the time because some of our Happy Pills can affect BP. But the many homeless who are not mentally ill quite likely have high blood pressure, given that the life expectancy of the homeless in These United States is about fifty years.
Quite conveniently, we all started lining up just outside the soup kitchens and rescue missions about an hour before each meal, so I can start at one end then offer everyone a blood pressure check, then if it's high I'll ask if they have insurance, if not I'll explain how to get medicaid then give them a card telling them where to go to get it as well as the names of addresses of a few clinics that accept it.
I'm planning to buy a good-quality automated blood pressure monitor because my own has been steadily creeping up over the last year. I really don't know why, but I plan to fight it by cutting out salt two weeks from now, then a month from now joining a gym. (When I get paid.)
Why not cut out salt right now? Because I quit coffee cold-turkey on Saturday. Yesterday was pretty rough; today I merely feel like shit.
Why not this weekend? Because that's when I'll cut out most of the sugar in my diet.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 28 2018, @02:14PM (1 child)
Salt only affects blood pressure in the short term, it would be much better if you just start simple bodyweight exercises now instead of waiting to go to the gym.
Start very simply and force yourself to sustain that small amount (e.g. at least five squats every morning no matter what and more if you can or at least three minutes of exercise every morning).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 28 2018, @05:26PM
Yeah you really don't need the gym, just go for 30+ minute walks in a hilly area, or power walk. Not insane cardio, but also easier on knees and motivation.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday August 28 2018, @05:36PM
There are regularized AFib patterns as well, where the pacemaker signal comes from the atrioventricular node, casuing AFib, but the pattern is steady. This app wouldn't catch those. Not saying it's not worth using, just that specific to AFib there would be an automatic false negative rate.
https://lifeinthefastlane.com/ecg-library/junctional-escape-rhythm/ [lifeinthefastlane.com]
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 28 2018, @10:15PM (2 children)
For years I've known that atrial fibrillation (afib) was an atrium flapping rapidly or spasm-ing, and not giving a good pump to fill the ventricle. But I never understood the connection to clots and stroke. Looking at a few websites on afib, the writers are also missing the connection, they jump from one directly to the other. Maybe it's obvious to everyone but me, but just recently I heard this from a cardiologist which made some sense:
When an atrium doesn't empty reasonably-completely on every stroke, there can be some amount of blood that stays in the atrium, for a relatively long time. Blood starts to clot when it isn't moving frequently, so a little "back water" in the atrium without proper circulation can lead to a clot forming there.
Further comments?
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday August 29 2018, @05:49PM
You've pretty well got it. The other thing is that blood clots form, absent of leukemia or other pathology, for two reasons: damage to tissue and if the blood is moving at a relative slowness. It's not just that it's 'drying out' or clumping on its own - there are different precursor chemicals produced when your body cells are damaged versus blood is running slowly. (the two paths meet up and complete the same ends, just with different initiating enzymes and beginnings of a cascade reaction). The blood doesn't have to stop flowing, either, just an interruption in the free flow pathway. An AFib thrombus is created by the same pathway that a clot is created by arteriosclerosis - the blood is moving too slowly and then the clot gets lodged up against a cardiac or arterial valve or gets jacked up as the arteries narrow down into arterioles.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday August 29 2018, @05:52PM
I suppose the other thing to note is that in AFib you've still got gravity working on your side and thus the atria do not have to work as hard - even if compression isn't complete an amount of blood will still drain down into the ventricles. The only job of the atria is to pass the blood to the ventricles. But the Ventricles are both fighting gravity and having to push that blood volume through both the respiratory system and the remainder of your body/exterior of your heart. Atria set up the work for the ventricles to do their job. That's why ventricular fibrilations are generally more serious and why your ventricles are massively muscled compared to your atria.
This sig for rent.