On the importance of symptometric monitoring

On the importance of routine monitoring of women’s symptoms – why our technology for symptometric monitoring is essential

The purpose of this article is to bring to your attention the big picture. That is the fact that the potential impact of the bioZhena technology goes beyond reproductive management. We illustrate how we mean it when we invoke the vision that the Ovulona device will become a friendly routinely-used companion tool with numerous diagnostic ramifications for women everywhere.

You do realize that there are gender differences in how patients respond to therapy, and you do not need reminding that cardiovascular disease is a big problem for women’s health, far from killing mainly male victims.

You will follow the discussion here better if you had perused the article, listed under Pages and titled, What is symptometric? What is the meaning of “symptometric data”?

In brief, a technology development from bioZhena will provide an interface for the quantification and recording of daily symptoms. By design, the symptometric data will be correlated with the Ovulona data – and will be far better than the underused, inefficient and costly, paper-using procedures of yesteryear.

A recent health news headline declares: “More evidence that depression is hard on the heart”, and here is the synopsis: Severe depression may silently break a seemingly healthy woman’s heart. Doctors have long known that depression is common after a heart attack or stroke, and worsens those people’s outcomes. Monday, Columbia University researchers reported new evidence that depression can lead to heart disease in the first place [http://channels.isp.netscape.com/news/story.jsp?floc=ne-story-9-l9&idq=/ff/story/0001%2F20090310%2F0629929017.htm&sc=1500 03/10/09 06:29 © Copyright The Associated Press].

The issue is not the reported “big surprise: Sudden cardiac death seemed more closely linked with antidepressant use than with the depression symptoms the women reported. That might simply mean that women who used antidepressants were, appropriately, the most seriously depressed, cautioned lead researcher Dr. William Whang. But he said the finding merited more research.”

The issue is that not only more research but all routine women’s health practice requires the knowledge of how symptoms relate to (correlate with) the course of the menstrual cycle or, more accurately put, the course of folliculogenesis.

Effective therapy requires this, and our technology will do three things for public health:

1. Enable routine quantitative recording of symptoms,
2. Correlate symptoms with the underlying folliculogenesis process, and
3. Allow for individualization of therapy (titrate medication doses for individuals).

This is one of the examples of non-reproductive applications of the bioZhena planned products; this is simply a reminder that the core product, the Ovulona™ for reproductive management, is far from the only planned product offering.

Have you been to About bioZhena – tech pitch? So you know that a set of 5 slides tells more (animated slides, progressing automatically but you can pause and navigate back and forth). In a nutshell: The menstrual cycle is a vital sign, and our Ovulona monitor provides long-term signatures of the vital sign-menstrual cyclic profile over many cycles. Correlating the symptometric data with the cyclic signatures of the folliculogenesis process is medically meaningful and helpful.