Disruption of sleep, sleep-wake activity rhythm, and nocturnal melatonin production in breast cancer patients undergoing adjuvant chemotherapy: prospective cohort study
Li et al.
The finding, in our words
Adjuvant chemotherapy reduced sleep efficiency by up to ten percentage points and disrupted sleep-wake rhythm in breast cancer patients, while first-morning urinary melatonin metabolite levels fell by up to fifteen percent. The study shows that wrist actigraphy and home urine collection can remotely track these treatment effects, validating decentralised monitoring in oncology.
A paraphrase to the Library’s standard, never the abstract. The source is one link away and is always the authority.
The High-Definition Oncology feasibility study in 30 women with metastatic cancer demonstrated high adherence to biospecimen collection (97.4% plasma, 80.7% stool) and wearable monitoring (70–95% of days captured for activity, heart rate, sleep, and oxygen saturation). This establishes a viable framework for decentralised, multimodal data collection in oncology to support individualised treatment models.
Garma et al., JCO precision oncology (paywalled) · source ↗
The study found that a heat-treated probiotic formulation did not significantly improve sleep scores in the full cohort but did modulate endocrine markers, showing up-regulated nocturnal melatonin and improved daytime orexin levels, with a tendency toward reduced nocturnal salivary cortisol. Benefits were more pronounced in participants with higher baseline insomnia severity, suggesting the intervention may be most useful for symptomatic populations.
In progressive multiple sclerosis, higher serum neurofilament light chain levels were associated with reduced daily step counts from wearables, while higher step counts were linked to lower sNfL. A ten percent increase in steps corresponded to a 0.015 decrease in sNfL z-score, suggesting rising sNfL may predict subsequent mobility decline.
Joseph et al., Annals of clinical and translational neurology (paywalled) · source ↗
Wearable biochemical monitoring requires a complete measurement chain that integrates quality-controlled biofluid sampling, sensor fusion and metadata capture to convert raw sensor outputs into clinically valid digital biomarkers.
Wearing-off symptoms during natalizumab treatment in multiple sclerosis correlate with fatigue but not with inflammatory or neurodegenerative biomarkers, suggesting they are not markers of disease activity. Passive wearable monitoring detected subtle end-of-cycle motor declines and dynamic activity features that aligned with fatigue, indicating potential for digital biomarkers to serve as remote endpoints in decentralised neurological care.
Masanneck et al., Neurotherapeutics : the journal of the American Society for Experimental NeuroTherapeutics (paywalled) · source ↗