Cardiometabolic diseases (CMDs) are a group of interconnected disorders including metabolic diseases and cardiovascular complications, such as heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, insulin resistance, and more.
They are a leading cause of global deaths, with 19.91 million reported in 2021, and genetics, and environment and lifestyle factors such as smoking, lack of exercise, and diet are all contributing factors.
Traditional methods of CMD assessments rely on infrequent visits to doctors, but the rise of digital biomarkers in recent years are helping to improve monitoring of such conditions, as well as treatment approaches.
The role of digital biomarkers and digital endpoints
Digital biomarkers can bring immense value in clinical research and healthcare by offering non-invasive, objective, and continuous measurements of physiological and behavioral parameters, collected via wearable sensors. These provide a deeper understanding of disease progression, treatment effectiveness, and patient response in real-world settings, facilitating more robust and patient-centric research. They can particularly serve as a game-changer tool in clinical trials by serving as digital endpoints, providing objective, near real-time, and quantifiable insights, while reducing bias and enhancing reliability.
By continuously gathering data, digital endpoints help to show a more complete view of a patient’s health data, allowing for in-depth analysis that traditional site or doctor visits cannot capture.
The key advantages of digital endpoints for CMD monitoring that we’ll be exploring include:
- The ability to personalize treatment plans
- Near real-time data collection, for immediate action
- Improving accessibility for a diverse range of participants
The ability to personalize treatment plans
CMDs are influenced by genetics, environmental factors, and an individual’s lifestyle. So monitoring a patient’s health data continuously and in near real-time allows researchers and healthcare professionals to assess how all of these factors interact, in order to create treatment plans and conduct research that best suits patients’ individual needs.
Traditional studies often rely on in-person site visits, with subjective recollection and more sporadic measurements, which lack the continuous data collection and ability to accurately see how different factors are impacting a patient’s health data.
Near real-time data collection, for immediate action
Digital endpoints allow for near-real time data collection and analysis outside clinical settings. This allows researchers to take immediate action based on the data collected.
For example, if they found that one particular study cohort’s results differed to others, they could investigate this in near real-time or adapt their trial design. Or, if researchers found that particular cohorts or individuals were not as compliant as others, they could easily intervene to encourage stronger participant compliance and in turn more reliable results.
Improving accessibility for a diverse range of patients
Digital endpoints can also make research and treatment options more accessible, allowing a wider range of patients to participate in studies, and in turn contribute to the development of more effective treatment plans.
Traditional clinical trials require participants to attend research sites for frequent visits, which many may be unable to do due to geographic and socioeconomic factors, or due to their health condition. Whereas the use of wearable technology enables remote patient monitoring, which opens up research studies to a more diverse range of participants, ensuring better representation across studies and the development of treatment plans that better serve the wider population.
The rise of digital endpoints in CMD research and clinical care is helping to personalize treatment plans, allows researchers to take immediate action, and ensures research reflects a diverse population. As wearable technology continues to become more prominent, these tools will play an even more significant role in CMD research, with the continuous aim to improve outcomes for all patients.
TIMESPAN’s ART-CARMA project is using Empatica’s EmbracePlus wearable, part of the Empatica Health Monitoring Platform, to study the management of chronic cardiometabolic disease and treatment discontinuity in adult ADHD patients. The project aims to understand the risks of cardiometabolic illnesses such as cardiovascular disease and obesity for adults with ADHD, and how their future health can be best improved through medication.
To find out more about Empatica’s solutions and how thousands of research partners and institutions, including NASA, are using their technology, visit their website.
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