🦾 Your Cell Phone May Be A Lab Soon

THE health and wellness newsletter

Author

James Kratch
April 23, 2024

In partnership with

Welcome back to Optimize Me — the health and wellness newsletter for evidence-based advice on how to 🥦 eat better, 🏋️ workout smarter, and 🧑‍💻 be more productive.

In today’s send: A potentially revolutionary use for your smartphone, new research on hormone therapy, why your mother was probably right about eating too fast, and beauty sleep is a real thing.

Let’s get to it.

🦾 Get ready to iMeasure

We recently wrote about the first over-the-counter continuous glucose monitor and its health implications. A new study suggests we may all already be carrying one.

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology believe a smartphone compass can analyze biomarkers in body fluids to diagnose and monitor disease.

  • The compass inside phones is a magnetometer designed to detect the Earth's magnetic fields. But it can also detect small magnets that are nearby, and pick up on changes in position.

  • The concept calls for embedding a magnet inside a strip of hydrogel that contracts or expands when immersed in a solution. The setup is similar to chemical test strips used on pools; it is clamped to a phone near the compass, with the small magnet moving based on the reaction.

  • After calibration and coding, researchers accurately measured glucose levels in champagne, pinot grigio and sangria; detection limits were on par with or superior to various glucose sensors, including CGMs. They also accurately assessed the pH levels of coffee, orange juice and root beer.

Any clinical or commercial use is well in the future. Further research is needed to replicate the findings and confirm the methods work with body fluids. Researchers believe the hydrogel may need to be altered to be compatible with body fluids and to identify specific targets, but they say the tech should be applied to blood, saliva, sweat, and urine. The tech could also have applications in checking water for contaminants. 

Using smartphones and wearables (and accompanying devices) for medical monitoring is nothing new. They can accurately track steps and cardiac function, measure blood oxygen levels and blood pressure and assess breathing and sleep quality. Recent innovations have pushed the devices' capabilities further, such as pairing a smartphone camera with artificial intelligence to detect skin cancer. And future possibilities appear endless. 

There will still be concerns though. Many experts are already against making CGMs available for non-diabetic patients for myriad reasons as highlighted in our past analysis. 

  • Glucose data is complicated. Normal blood sugar level fluctuations can be significant. There is fear uneducated patients will be spooked by their readings and potentially make adverse diet decisions. Healthy foods like fruit can raise blood sugar, for example.

  • Patients with CGMs can become obsessive about the data. They are also not recommended for people with eating disorders. 

  • Some CGM tech (not the device recently cleared by the FDA) is designed for people with diabetes; functions have sparked panic in non-diabetic users, including unnecessary hospital visits.

  • A Harvard Medical School analysis found only a study commissioned by a medical device manufacturer concluded that non-diabetic CGM usage is beneficial.

Those concerns increase exponentially if the NIST study is validated and even more people gain access to medical monitoring capabilities. But that is also why the tech may represent a significant breakthrough. There are an estimated 7B smartphones worldwide that could deliver life-saving health information to people in an efficient -- and likely affordable -- manner.

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💪 New hormone therapy research

Most women can continue menopausal hormone therapy after age 65 with good outcomes, according to a new study.

  • HT is when estrogen and other hormones are taken to replace the ones a woman's body naturally loses while going through menopause.

  • Researchers examined the health records of 10M senior women on Medicare from 2007-2020. The study found that patients who had HT after 65 experienced significant risk reductions compared to patients who never had HT or stopped it before 65, suggesting age should not be used as a general rule to halt treatments.

  • Patients who used estrogen had about a 20% lower mortality rate and were less likely to develop breast (16%), lung (13%) and colorectal (12%) cancers. They also had slightly smaller risk rates for various cardiovascular diseases and dementia.

  • Estrogen and progestin patients experienced significant risk reductions in endometrial (45%) and ovarian (20%) cancers. Estrogen and progesterone were only found to reduce the risk of congestive heart failure modestly. 

  • The combination of estrogen and particular progestogen treatments can lead to a 10-20% increase in breast cancer risk, but that risk is mitigated with supplemental treatment. The study did not tackle the health impacts of women who start HT after age 65.

HT has been controversial, especially in older women, since the Women's Health Initiative found it led to an increased risk for a range of health issues in the early 2000s. The study was aborted as a result, spurring many women to shun HT.

But the WHI findings have since been discredited. The research was flawed, failing to take into account the non-HT health risk factors of the study participants and the age they started HT. Still, the stigma has remained -- past surveys have found well under 10% of women have HT prescriptions despite its efficacy in treating menopause symptoms and the positive risk reduction outcomes that have been identified regarding a host of health issues in older people.

Researchers said substantial education efforts remain necessary to counter the conventional wisdom established by the past studies. Further research is also needed into the impacts of HT on various age groups based on approach. But if women start HT before age 60 or within 10 years of menopause, the benefits appear to outweigh any negatives. And if you have started HT within the suggested parameters, there is no reason to stop solely because you hit an age milestone.

🥦 Slow your (eating) roll

Take your time at the table, folks.

Researchers in South Korea have concluded that people who eat fast have elevated long-term health risks, in addition to short-term consequences.

  • The immediate potential ramifications of eating too fast are well-known: Bloating, indigestion, gas, heartburn, nausea, etc.

  • A study of about 11K Korean adults found that people who completed a meal in under five minutes were almost twice as likely to develop endoscopic erosive gastritis as people who spent 15-plus minutes on a meal.

  • A separate, smaller study found higher rates of functional dyspepsia (recurring indigestion) in Korean female military cadets that ate quickly.

Eating fast is also connected to body weight and overeating. It takes about 20 minutes for the stomach to signal to the brain it is satisfied following a meal, so people who eat fast can override this process and intake excess calories. Overeating also causes food to remain in the stomach longer, which contributes to gastrointestinal diseases as well.

There is also a potential correlation between fast eating and diabetes. Two studies in Japan — one a small cohort survey, the other involving close to 200K participants across the country — found significant ties between fast eating, insulin resistance and the development of type-2 diabetes.

To level set: Fast eating could alter metabolic process, leading to negative health outcomes. But fast eating may also just be a quality found in people who are already predisposed to those health issues. That is why slowing down your meal pace alone may not lead to health benefits. But it certainly cannot hurt, and those who eat fast likely want to reflect on what it may signal for their well-being.

❌ Don’t Eat This: Recalls

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