Do you want to know if you are really stressed? A new gadget strapped to your waist can tell you — and it may also be able to tell if you have diabetes
- The U-RHYTHM device could revolutionize the way certain diseases are diagnosed
- The gadget tracks the stress levels under the skin all day and night
Diabetes, heart disease and depression can be spotted more easily thanks to a wearable monitor that detects stress.
Researchers have developed a device that has the ability to consistently measure levels of stress hormones throughout the day.
It has the potential to “revolutionize” the way certain diseases are diagnosed and treated, the scientists said.
And it even works while someone is sleeping – making it the first time hormone levels can be measured outside of a hospital setting during the night.
Researchers have developed a device that has the ability to consistently measure levels of stress hormones throughout the day
A team of researchers from the Universities of Bristol, Birmingham and Bergen is behind the device, called U-RHYTHM.
Worn painlessly around the waist, it automatically records samples of stress hormones, including cortisol, from under the skin every 20 minutes without the need to draw blood.
When someone suffers from depression, heart disease, obesity and diabetes, the rhythm of the stress hormone can be disturbed.
Until now, however, scientists have been unable to define what a “normal” rhythm looks like in everyday life.
The team asked 214 healthy people of different ages, gender and BMI to wear the monitors for 24 hours.
This allowed the scientists to create hormone profiles, which show what healthy stress hormone levels look like on a normal day.
These can then form a ‘baseline’ to detect earlier conditions such as diabetes that cause a change in these hormone levels.
Until now, scientists have been unable to define what a ‘normal’ rhythm looks like in everyday life. This new device can monitor hormone levels outside of a hospital setting all night long
Until now, the only way to get an accurate picture of hormone levels was to take multiple blood samples while in hospital or in a research department – which is time consuming and stressful.
Dr. Thomas Upton, Clinical Research Fellow in Automated Sampling at the University of Bristol and lead endocrinologist in the study, said: ‘Our results represent a paradigm shift in understanding how the stress hormone system works in healthy people. The information we’ve gathered constitutes an entirely new reference range that has the potential to revolutionize the way diseases of the stress hormone system are diagnosed and treated.”
Stafford Lightman, Professor of Medicine at Bristol Medical School: Translational Health Sciences and co-author of the study, explained: ‘Our results provide important new insights into how the stress hormone system works in healthy people, highlighting the importance of measuring change . , not just sampling at individual points.
“It also highlights the importance of measuring hormones during sleep, which was previously impossible outside of a hospital.”
The findings were published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.