Monat: Mai 2017

Your Apple Watch Could Someday Detect This Risky Heart Condition

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The Apple Watch’s heart rate sensors come in handy for knowing how hard your blood is pumping at the gym. But a new, if preliminary, study suggests that the smartwatch also has the potential to spot a much more serious medical condition: an irregular heart rate, known as atrial fibrillation.

The study’s researchers first trained an algorithm to recognize instances of atrial fibrillation in heart rate measurements submitted by people all over the world. The algorithm then accurately detected when a small group of people was experiencing atrial fibrillation in real time, based on data flowing from the Apple Watch on their wrists.

These results are being presented Thursday at the Heart Rhythm Society’s annual conference in Chicago. They have not been published in a scientific journal and need to be validated in larger groups of patients, so don’t expect your Apple Watch to replace a heart check-up any time soon.

Still, cardiology experts say that if the concept is proven to work, the Apple Watch could be a useful tool in helping identify, track, and treat patients with a medical condition that affects an estimated 2.7 million Americans. Atrial fibrillation increases risk of blood clots, stroke, and heart failure — but because it sometimes doesn’t result in symptoms, it can go undetected and untreated, according to the American Heart Association. Catching it early, alerting a doctor, and treating it with blood-thinning medications could save lives.

“This is an important study which gives hope to the notion that someday, it may be possible on a widespread basis for patients or individuals to detect atrial fibrillation with smartwatch technology,” said Hugh Calkins, director of the Cardiac Arrhythmia Service at Johns Hopkins University, who was not involved with the study. He also stressed that it is “no more than an early proof of concept.”

“We were pretty surprised that a device you could go into Best Buy and purchase was capable of this level of accuracy.”

The study, led by researchers at UC San Francisco and the heart rate-analysis startup Cardiogram, illustrates how wearables could help make scientific research and health care more personalized, precise, and effective. Millions of devices sold by companies like Apple, Fitbit, Garmin, and Jawbone are capturing unprecedented quantities of biometric data, from steps to sleep to heart rate, that researchers have never had access to before.

There are already a couple wireless, FDA-cleared devices that atrial fibrillation patients can use to track their heart rate, but because they aren’t meant to be worn all the time, they inevitably miss some data. The Zio Patch sticks to your chest for two weeks, which makes it most useful for monitoring patients right after they’re discharged from the hospital. The AliveCor, a set of electrodes that straps onto the back of your smartphone, produces a heart-rate readout when you press on it.

But people wear Apple Watches all the time. One analyst estimated that Apple sold 6 million units in the last quarter of 2016 alone — nearly 80% of the total smartwatch market. That popularity, along with its high-quality heart-rate sensor, makes it an attractive tool for researchers like Greg Marcus, an atrial fibrillation expert at UCSF and senior author of the study.

Instead of requiring people to buy new gadgets, “the idea here is that we can leverage what people are buying on their own and using anyway,” Marcus told BuzzFeed News.

Marcus is leading an ongoing research project, called the Health e-Heart Study, which aims to study heart disease and health in people scattered throughout the globe. For this study, his team drew from a pool of about 6,400 Apple Watch owners, including 166 people with atrial fibrillation and AliveCor devices. Together, they produced nearly 140 million heart rate measurements and 6,340 AliveCor recordings.

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Cardiogram, a startup that’s raised $2 million from Andreessen Horowitz and other investors, collected those data points through its iOS app. Then it used them to train an algorithm to distinguish atrial fibrillation patterns from normal heart rhythms.

To see if it worked, Marcus’ group waited for atrial fibrillation patients to come to UCSF for cardioversions, the procedure for restoring a normal heart rhythm. They gave the patients Apple Watches to wear before, during, and after, and also ran electrocardiograms for a definitive record of their heartbeats. When the algorithm was later applied to the collected heart rate data, it turned out to flag atrial fibrillation episodes with 97% accuracy.

“We were pretty surprised that a device you could go into Best Buy and purchase was capable of this level of accuracy,” said Brandon Ballinger, cofounder of Cardiogram.

It’s an early example of how machine learning can potentially help diagnose people and spot health problems before humans do. But it may be a while before physicians feel totally comfortable relying on an algorithm.

“The downside is there’s a bit of a black-box nature to it,” Marcus said. “By its nature, it’s figuring out the best way to do it and we as investigators may not have as much transparency into the exact algorithm it’s using. That’s going to take some getting used to.”

Other hurdles mean algorithms and wearables are a long way from becoming a mainstay in medical care. When the Apple Watch was being tested on patients in the study, it had to be in workout mode in order to continually capture data. People had to keep still, since the heart rate sensors are potentially less accurate when the wearer is moving around. The algorithm was also tested on a small group of about 50. “This is just a promissory note because they only have a limited number of people they’ve analyzed so far,” said Eric Topol, a cardiologist and geneticist at the Scripps Research Institute, who was not involved with the study.

And while many people have Apple Watches, not all of them are at risk for atrial fibrillation, since the condition is more common in people over age 60. As Calkins put it, “Is your grandmother going to be able to wear this smartwatch to figure out if she has atrial fibrillation or not?”

Still, Topol says that he can see a future where “the Apple Watch and other wearables will get to a point where people will get an alert on their phone or through their devices that says look like you may have atrial fibrillation.” He added, “That’s where we’re headed.”

Quelle: <a href="Your Apple Watch Could Someday Detect This Risky Heart Condition“>BuzzFeed

Top Liberals Are Unintentionally Building An Anti-Trump Conspiracy Media

Harvard Law School's Laurence Tribe accepts an award from the ACLU in 2011.

Alberto E. Rodriguez / Getty Images

Democrats and the mainstream media have spent the months since Donald Trump's election fixated on the the flood of unconfirmed reports, half-truths, and outright propaganda that accompanied his rise.

But some of the country’s leading liberal lights — respected figures including elected officials, prominent legal scholars, members of the media and celebrities — are themselves sharing wild allegations about the Trump administration from unreliable sources.

Perhaps no one embodies this trend so well as Laurence Tribe. Tribe is one of the country’s foremost constitutional lawyers, a the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard Law School. He has argued dozens of cases in front of the Supreme Court. He’s a major figure in American public life. In recent months Tribe has devoted much of his activity on Twitter to outraged extrapolation about the Trump administration. Often, these take the form of “big if true” tweets that cite unconfirmed reports about Trump’s possible misdeeds and are essentially conjecture.

On April 22, Tribe shared a story from a website called the Palmer Report — a site that has been criticized for spreading hyperbole and false claims — entitled “Report: Trump gave $10 million in Russian money to Jason Chaffetz when he leaked FBI letter,” a reference to the notorious pre-election letter sent by former FBI director James Comey to members of Congress that many have blamed for Hillary Clinton’s November loss.

The “report” the article points to is a since-deleted tweet by a Twitter user named LM Garner, who describes herself in her Twitter biography as “Just a VERY angry citizen on Twitter. Opinions are my own. Sometimes prone to crazy assertions. Not a fan of this nepotistic kleptocracy.” Garner, who has 257 followers, has tweeted more than 25 thousand times from her protected account.

“I don't know whether this is true,” Tribe’s tweet reads, “But key details have been corroborated and none, to my knowledge, have been refuted. If true, it's huge.”

Reached by email, Tribe said that he was aware of the Palmer Report’s “generally liberal slant” and “that some people regard a number of its stories as unreliable.” Still, he added, “When I share any story on Twitter, typically with accompanying content of my own that says something like “If X is true, then Y,” I do so because a particular story seems to be potentially interesting, not with the implication that I’ve independently checked its accuracy or that I vouch for everything it asserts.”

Asked whether he had considered his role in spreading unconfirmed information, given his stature in American society, Tribe responded that “I really don’t have anything to tell you about my thoughts regarding my personal role in sharing information over social media in this usually agnostic manner.”

Tribe is far from alone among prominent liberals in sharing unconfirmed, speculative, and sometimes wild information. But he is emblematic of an information echo chamber that has grown up since the election around sites like the Palmer Report and figures like the anti-Russian influence crusader Louise Mensch, in which anti-Trump public figures share unreliable information, the very act of which the sources of these reports use to bolster their own legitimacy. It therefore operates similarly — though it is smaller and far less powerful — to the vast new right wing online media that launders dubious claims through increasingly mainstream outlets before, sometimes, reaching the highest levels of government.

The Palmer Report is the work of Bill Palmer, who describes himself on his website as a “political journalist who covered the 2016 election cycle from start to finish.” Before the Palmer Report, Palmer ran a site called Daily News Bin, which Snopes’ Brooke Binkowski called “…basically a pro-Hillary Clinton “news site.” It was out there to counter misinformation.” Last November, Palmer introduced his new site as an “investigative reporting…side project” and has since written hundreds of articles that range from “evidence-free” assertions that Vladimir Putin personally ordered last month’s chemical attack in Syria to a story entitled “Brain specialist doctor believes Donald Trump’s frontal lobe is failing” based on a single tweet by a doctor. Along the way Palmer has collected more than 63 thousand Twitter followers and more than a few famous signal boosters.

Indeed, the site includes a “Thank Yous” section, a long list of liberal notables who have shared the site’s stories. It includes MSNBC host Joy-Ann Reid, Harvard Law School Professor Laurence Tribe, novelist Joyce Carol Oates, director Rob Reiner, Trump foil Rosie O’Donnell, and Mark Hamill — Luke Skywalker. The Democratic California Congressman Ted Lieu is specially thanked for sharing a Palmer Report story on his official website.

Lieu's office did not respond to a request for comment.

The site had its most significant exposure yet this week. As confusion swirled in Washington Wednesday following President Trump’s firing of FBI director James Comey, Democratic Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey went on CNN to make an explosive claim: A grand jury had been empaneled in New York to investigate Trump’s ties to Russia. (Another grand jury investigation, in Virginia, has been reported by CNN.)

Among the outlets that eagerly picked up the news were the Palmer Report and the Twitter feed of Louise Mensch, the anti-Trump crusader who has accused hundreds of people of being Russian agents, often with no evidence.

And what were Markey’s sources for this alarming claim? According to a Guardian reporter and the Daily Caller, none other than the Palmer Report and Mensch themselves. Hours after making the claim, Markey was forced to apologize for spreading unsubstantiated information, and through a spokesman, to reveal that he had no direct knowledge of any New York investigation.

Markey's office did not respond to a request for comment.

And despite Markey’s apology, as of Thursday afternoon, the Palmer Report headline read: “U.S. Senator confirms grand jury is now underway in Donald Trump case in New York State.”

Quelle: <a href="Top Liberals Are Unintentionally Building An Anti-Trump Conspiracy Media“>BuzzFeed