One of the interesting aspects of the deployment of new wearable medical devices is the use of sensors attached to patients that have the capability of monitoring disease progression in a manner never before possible. This idea was discussed in a recent article (see: IBM Research develops fingerprint sensor to monitor disease progression). Here is a brief excerpt from it:
IBM...announced that it has developed a small sensor that sits on a person’s fingernail to help monitor the effectiveness of drugs used to combat the symptoms of Parkinson’s and other diseases. Together with the custom software that analyzes the data, the sensor measures how the nail warps as the user grips something. Because virtually any activity involves gripping objects, that creates a lot of data for the software to analyze. Another way to get this data would be to attach a sensor to the skin and capture motion, as well as the health of muscles and nerves that way.
This new article brought to mind my blog note of about ten years ago in which I discussed what I then referred to as the health continuum ranging from predisposition to disease => diagnosed predisease => acute or chronic disease (see: Predisposition to Disease and Pre-Disease on the Health Continuum). Pertaining to the predisposition to disease and diagnosed predisease, I made the following comment at that time:
[O]ne of the most interesting questions associated with the early disease model is whether it is appropriate to treat patients with pre-diseases. If they are deemed treatable and as we come to better understand the nature of pre-disease, a second question is what drugs to treat them with. As soon as we work out this question, we will then be faced with the new question of how and when to treat patients with a predisposition to disease, genetic or otherwise.
A friend has brought to my attention the idea that pharmaceutical industry and its researchers are showing great interest in the genetic predisposition to disease and also asymptomatic diseases in order to expand the size of the market for drugs. In the past, this has been referred to as disease mongering (see: Disease mongering and drug marketing; Disease Mongering (i.e., Medicalization) by Pharmaceutical Companies; Medical Device Mongering, a Variant of Disease Mongering).There is very little information available about treatment of pre-diseases with the notable exception of pre-diabetes (see: Prediabetes: when the pre-disease becomes the focus of treatment) where the treatment can often be behavioral relating to exercise and weight loss and not the use of drugs. At any rate, we can anticipate much more attention to pre-diseases and probably some controversy whether such patients can and should be treated with drugs.
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