A Mobile Health Application for the Fibromyalgia-Like Post-COVID19 Syndrome: Study Protocol … (2021) Blanchard et al

Full title:
A Mobile Health Application for the Fibromyalgia-Like Post-COVID19 Syndrome: Study Protocol for User Experience and Clinical Data Analysis


Abstract

Background: Post-COVID19 syndrome, also referred as 'long covid', describes persisting symptoms after SARS-CoV2 infection, including myalgia, fatigue, respiratory or neurological symptoms. Objective symptoms are often lacking, thus resembling a fibromyalgia-like syndrome. Digital therapeutics have shown efficiency in similar chronic disorders such as fibromyalgia, offering specific disease monitoring and interventions such as cognitive behavioral therapy or physical and respiratory exercise guidance.

Objective: To study requirements and features of a new mobile health application in patients suffering from fibromyalgia-like post-COVID19 syndrome in a clinical trial.

Methods: We created a web-application prototype for the post-COVID19 syndrome called 'POCOS', as an online rehabilitation tool aiming to improve clinical outcomes. Patients without organ damage or ongoing inflammation will be included in the study. The app use will be assessed by user experience questionnaires, focus groups and clinical data analysis. Subsequently, we will analyze cross-sectional and longitudinal clinical data.

Results: The developed mHealth app consists of a clinically adapted app interface with a simplified patient reported outcome assessment, monitoring of medical interventions and disease activity as well as online instructions for specific physical and respiratory exercises, stress reduction and lifestyle instructions. The enrollment of the participants is expected for November 2021.

Conclusions: User experience plays an important role in digital therapeutics and needs to be clinically tested to allow further improvement. We here describe this process for a new application for the treatment of the fibromyalgia-like post-COVID19 syndrome and discuss the relevance of the potential outcomes such as natural disease course and diseases phenotypes

Link to abstract: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34982039/

My comment: i can bet you the authors cannot describe the difference between ME and FM.

 

I wonder whether “stress reduction and lifestyle instructions” cause more or less harm when they devolve downwards from low-cost clinicians to even cheaper online platforms. They’re probably less likely to be followed, but even less likely to be appropriate to the individual biomedical circumstances.

 

I doubt whether all the long covid patients targeted will have had extensive testing to rule out organic (autoinflammatory and organ damage.)

This is because health care for long covid is lacking and there is no national insurance program in the US, and that so many have lost their jobs and thus their health coverage, even if it would pay for testing.

Sound like bogus treatment-lite, a la "digital."

 

At least there were active ingredients in actual snake oil. Modern snake oil is literally worse than the actual standard for bad medicine. Good grief the race to the bottom has been very successful at reaching it.