Preventing Parkinson’s: Up to Seven Years Earlier: Apple Watch Takes Action

Preventing diseases before symptoms appear is a central goal of healthcare. Knowing that someone will develop a particular disease would allow them to prepare both psychologically and physically, potentially taking medication to help prevent it.

As reported by the BBC, a smartwatch such as the Apple Watch could predict the onset of a particular disease up to seven years before the first symptoms appear. The disease in question is Parkinson's, which gradually affects the brain, causing slow movement, rigidity, stiffness, an abnormal gait and other symptoms.

By the time a diagnosis is made, the damage to the patient's brain cells is already extensive.

Using artificial intelligence, the research team at the UK Dementia Research Institute at Cardiff University analysed data from 103.712 smartwatch users. By tracking how quickly each person could move over the course of a week between 2013 and 2016, the team was able to identify who was more likely to develop Parkinson's disease. The study's lead researcher, Dr Cynthia Sandor, said that with 30% of people in the UK wearing a smartwatch, the device could help develop a more affordable, less costly way to diagnose Parkinson's disease at an early stage. "We have shown here that data collected over a week can predict developments that may occur up to seven years later. With these results, we could develop a valuable tool for pre-symptomatic screening, which could help with the early detection of Parkinson's disease. This would have significant implications both for research, improving prevention in clinical trials, and for clinical practice, allowing patients to access treatments at an early stage in the future, when these treatments become available", said Dr Sandor. Dr Catherine Peall, who also worked on the study, told the BBC that using a smartwatch not only accurately predicts who will develop Parkinson's disease, but also determines whether symptoms stem from the disease or from the frailty common among older people. "The results from people diagnosed with Parkinson's disease were distinct", said Dr Peall.

She also added, "We compared our model with a number of different disorders, including other types of neurodegenerative disorders, people with osteoarthritis and other movement disorders, among others, which is an advantage of being able to work with a dataset such as UK Biobank.” Biobank is an "in-depth health database" covering more than 500.000 people.

The question this raises is whether someone would want to know that they will develop such a disease in the future. As Dr Peall pointed out, "this will always be an individual and personal choice. The important point of this research is that we hope new treatments will eventually become available that will allow us to slow the progression of the disease".