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by mschwarz 1383 days ago
It’s great to see more companies focusing on inflammation. Is it possible to create a device like a continuous glucose monitor but for inflammation?
2 comments

Th glucose monitor warns you to take Insulin but, The question for me is what action should be taken after high inflammation is detected? It seems like once an alert goes off, it's just a warning to go see a doctor.

The treatments for inflammation, and the indication of what specifically is causing it, seem to be rather limited to me beyond taking antibiotics or anti inflammatory meds.

Ibuprofen is fairly flawed as a regular treatment for many because of the ulcer risks...

There are many suggested treatments for inflammation, OP mentions “ginger”, my guess is that like everything else with the body certain treatments work for some people and not others. Like how CGM’s are used now not just for diabetes but for a tighter feedback loop on which foods, etc spike insulin, which allows a person to iterate their lifestyle faster. It’s the same with inflammation- If you have chronic inflammation and are trying to reduce it with diet, exercise, medication, naturopathic treatments, a tighter feedback loop would be a game changer, assuming it was possible. Perhaps CRP does not respond as quick to changes in the body as glucose, and measuring it all the time isn’t gaining much.
Great comment! We believe there is a future where continuous inflammation testing will be possible. Here's a team already working on building it: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/admt.2021013...

To your point, we see it as a potentially tighter feedback loop for seeing the impact of lifestyle changes.

Agreed, that only highlights the need to have a network of reliable places someone can go in order to have personally tailored care.

Just finding a doctor that can see you immediately in the US without racking up expensive emergency room fees is darn near impossible now in the US... It always comes back to our ritually broken health care system. :(

One interesting thing about going to continuous (or near-continuous) testing is you can get much narrower error bars on your baseline.

If you test once a month, how do you know if you accidentally tested during a transient spike?

If you test continuously, you can roll up those measurements to get things like p95, stddev, whatever.

So it’s useful even if you don’t want to respond in minutes to a spike. (You probably don’t need per-second readings for this, hourly would be enough.)

I don’t know if transient spikes are considered a risk factor, but you also get more chance to resolve those too.

Lifestyle changes including those related to nutrition, exercise, stress, and sleep can all improve inflammation levels. See our blog for a list of lifestyle interventions associated with decreased inflammation levels: https://www.begolden.online/post/lifestyle-interventions-ass...

Each person will respond differently so we suggest testing what works best for you.

We think so! We have started to see teams working on this and couldn't be more excited: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/admt.2021013...