Not all health apps are as reliable as they say! In fact, of the many applications for self-diagnosis or self-monitoring, only a few of them are actually designed and validated by health professionals.
On the occasion of the Congress of the European Society of Arterial Hypertension, doctors connected with the Health on the Net Foundation (HON), presented the results of a survey about self-monitoring of blood pressure by pregnant women. The conclusion is clear: it remains necessary that these measures are performed by a doctor or midwife rather than through an e-Health application.
A cardiovascular condition not to be taken lightly
Although European and North American authorities recommend that, in some cases, home-based surveillance be conducted - usually to avoid the "white coat" effect and to detect possible hypertension. masked - this survey conducted by doctors, and available on the website automesure.com, calls into question the reliability of self-monitoring applications while warning pregnant women.
According to them, high blood pressure- An abnormal increase in blood pressure on the artery wall - must be measured by a doctor or midwife, especially pregnant women. This chronic disease, which affects between 8 and 10% of women represents a real danger for pregnant women and fetuses and is now a major cause of maternal and fetal mortality and morbidity in the world.
Applications that need to be sifted
The authors of the study pointed out that many of the self-monitoring applications are unreliable, having often been designed without the control of the health authorities or any medical validation. According to the HON, it is necessary to appraise them in order to know which applications can be recommended or not.
The study evokes several scenarios with, for example, a voltage measurement application in the United States that has sold more than 149,000 copies. Recent expertise has shown that the unreliability of this application has led to erroneous diagnoses of hypertension. Out of 107 applications screened by a previous survey in 2016, only three had actually been designed with the help of doctors and health professionals, while none had been tested in a medical setting to receive clinical validation.
An unattended self-evaluation
To collect more data on the behavior of users of health applications, the authors anonymously interviewed 420 women who used a weight monitoring program during pregnancy. The survey revealed that 34% of these women also monitored their blood pressure and that 90% of them did so on their own without consulting their doctor. This new evidence shows the importance of health applications today and physicians believe it is necessary for health professionals to help develop these applications.
At present, only two applications ( ESH Care and Hy-Result) have actually been validated clinically and comply with the recommendations of the European Society of Hypertension.
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