Health care is harnessing electronic devices to monitor chronic diseases
Tom Blackwell, National Post
Published: Tuesday, October 02, 2007Each time Joyce Telford visited the doctor and had her blood pressure measured, it always came back too high, an unsettling pattern that led to the 49-year-old taking more and more hypertension medication. What Ms. Telford's blood-pressure did in the weeks between those visits, however, was always a bit of a mystery.
Then the Toronto nurse took part in a novel study at the city's Mount Sinai Hospital that coupled a wireless-equipped blood-pressure cuff, regular home readings and a cellphone that helped send the measurements to her doctor, letting the physician see a range of readings, instead of just one. It turned out that between visits, her blood pressure actually stayed under control, news that persuaded her doctor to hold off on prescribing yet another drug.
The study published this month in the American Journal of Hypertension also pointed to other, more impressive benefits from the cellphone-based system, which sent alerts to patients and doctors when their blood pressure got too high or too low. The average blood-pressure readings of the 31 participants fell significantly over the study period, reductions that in the long-term would translate into 40% fewer heart attacks and strokes among hypertension and diabetes patients, said Dr. Alexander Logan, the Mount Sinai nephrologist who headed the study.
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