The new collaborative research led by the Universities of Bristol and Birmingham in the UK, and Norway’s University of Bergen is claimed to have the potential to change how diseases of the stress hormone system are diagnosed and treated.
According to the team, the U-RHYTHM device makes it possible for the first time to measure changes to people’s stress hormones as they go about normal daily activities, across day and night.
Funded by an EU Horizon 2020 project grant and published in Science Translational Medicine, the technology shows how tracking adrenal steroid levels at high resolution and over an extended time can provide better information about how hormone levels change across daily (circadian) and faster (ultradian) time periods.
Hormones like adrenaline, cortisol, and norepinephrine are released in the body when people experience stress. They help deal with stressful situations by increasing heart rate, blood pressure, and blood sugar levels. Disturbance of their rhythms due to disease and lifestyle factors are related to diseases like depression, heart disease, obesity, diabetes and even critical illness. Until now scientists have not been able to define what normal rhythmicity looks like in healthy daily life.
Previously the only way to build an accurate picture has been to take multiple samples of blood during admission to a hospital or research unit.
U-RHYTHM has been developed by scientists from Bristol University, designed by Designworks Windsor, and available through the Bristol spin-out company Dynamic Therapeutics. The wearable device is worn around the waist, automatically sampling from beneath the skin every 20 minutes without the need to collect blood. In use, U-RHYTHM takes samples during sleep, work, and other daily life activities for up to 72 hours in a single session.
The study demonstrates the potential for the U-RHYTHM device, analysing samples from 214 healthy volunteers over 24 hours. Using data across multiple time points in that period, the team were able to create adrenal hormone profiles of healthy people in real-life conditions.
Mathematicians from Birmingham University’s Centre for Systems Modelling and Quantitative Biomedicine used these data to develop a new class of ‘dynamic markers’ to better understand how a healthy hormonal profile should look depending on an individual’s sex, age, body mass index, plus other characteristics.
These findings show what healthy hormonal rhythms look like in the population, in real-world settings, and could form a baseline for new, better ways to diagnose endocrine conditions at a much earlier stage.
In a statement, Stafford Lightman, Professor of Medicine at Bristol Medical School: Translational Health Sciences (THS) and a co-author on the study, said: “Our results provide significant new insights into how the stress hormone system works in healthy people, and emphasises the importance of measuring change, not just sampling at single points. It also highlights the importance of measuring hormones during sleep, which has previously been impossible outside of a hospital.
Lightman continued: “The ability to measure the dynamics of hormone secretion across the day and night in patients in their own home will not only improve our ability to accurately diagnose any abnormality in hormone secretion without the need for complex inpatient investigations, but the whole diagnostic procedure can be performed from primary care and linked to newly available diagnostic algorithms. This will not only provide good, personalised medicine, but will also allow the patient to follow their own hormone profiles during diagnosis and therapy and empower better patient-doctor discussions.”
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