Electrocardiographic Digital Biomarkers in Asymptomatic Schoolchildren with Rheumatic Heart Disease
Chuma et al.
The finding, in our words
In schoolchildren screened in an RHD-endemic region, those with echocardiography-confirmed rheumatic heart disease showed longer PR intervals, greater P-wave dispersion and altered P-wave to PR-interval ratios on ECG compared with healthy peers, indicating that digital ECG biomarkers could aid decentralised screening despite low prevalence of overt rhythm disturbances.
A paraphrase to the Library’s standard, never the abstract. The source is one link away and is always the authority.
Home spirometry gave slightly lower percent-predicted FEV1 values than office measurements cross-sectionally, but the three-month change in lung function did not differ significantly between settings. This suggests home spirometry can reliably detect treatment effects, supporting its use as an endpoint for decentralised cystic fibrosis trials.
Rosenfeld et al., Annals of the American Thoracic Society (paywalled) · source ↗
Remote motor assessment achieved a 95 percent completion rate and high caregiver acceptability in children with Canavan disease. Good to excellent inter- and intra-rater reliability demonstrates that rigorous remote assessment protocols can be implemented in decentralised trials for rare pediatric conditions, reducing burden on families.
Kiefer et al., Pediatric neurology (paywalled) · source ↗
Across perinatal care, wearable sensors and home-monitoring platforms support timely intervention, with remote monitoring linked to a 7 to 11 percent reduction in maternal mortality and preeclampsia incidence. In neonatal care, predictive digital monitoring such as the Heart Rate Observation system reduced mortality in very low-birth-weight infants by approximately 20 percent.
This systematic review of ten studies with 49,172 participants found that machine-learning models integrating continuous glucose monitoring data with clinical, genetic and multi-omic biomarkers achieved AUC values up to 0.993 for early type 1 diabetes detection, with plasma CXCL10 and IL-1RA emerging as useful markers. The findings support decentralised diagnostics by validating wearable-derived digital biomarkers alongside plasma biomarkers, though data heterogeneity and limited generalisability remain barriers to clinical implementation.
Mittal et al., International journal of molecular sciences · source ↗
This review identifies actigraphy, EEG, eye tracking and balance assessments as non-invasive, effort-independent tools that show promise for diagnosing and monitoring traumatic brain injury across animal models and human patients, particularly in children. It concludes that combining multiple biomarkers into a panel offers better prospects than relying on any single measure, though translation from preclinical to clinical use requires addressing age-related differences and interspecies variability.
Hajiaghamemar et al., Experimental neurology · source ↗