Text messages "could prevent strokes"

Scientists from the Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) recently conducted a randomised trial involving 303 patients who had been prescribed both blood pressure and cholesterol lowering medication.

The trial tested whether text messaging improved the use of such medication for the prevention of heart attacks and stroke.

“Most people now own a mobile phone and text messaging could be coupled with each relevant prescription

Professor David Taylor

Patients were divided into two groups - a ’text message’ group who received periodic text messages and a ’no text’ group who received no text messages - over the course of seven months.

The ’text message’ group received texts every day for two weeks, alternate days for two weeks and then weekly for 6 months, asking if they had taken their medication that day.

Patients who had not, or did not reply, were telephoned and offered help.

However, in the ’no text’ group, 25% of patients stopped their medication completely or took less than four fifths of their prescribed treatment, compared with only 9% in the ’text message’ group.

David Wald, consultant cardiologist at QMUL and lead author, said: “An important and overlooked problem in medicine is the failure to take prescribed medication. The results of this trial show that text message reminders help prevent this in a simple and effective way.

“More than just a reminder, the texts provided the link to identify patients who needed help.”

Likewise, David Taylor, emeritus professor of Pharmaceutical and Public Health Policy at University College London suggested that the health implications of the results taken from this study are “considerable from both an economic and a health-gain perspective”.

“Most people now own a mobile phone and text messaging could be coupled with each relevant prescription, preventing several thousand heart attacks and strokes in the UK each year,” Taylor said.

“The method is not limited to cardiovascular disease prevention and could be used for patients on treatment for other chronic diseases.”

In a similar study, Sean Young at the University of California said that ’big data’ could be used to to curb the spread of diseases such as HIV.

“Big data science is important because technologies such as mobile phones, wearable devices, and diagnostic tests have become increasingly affordable and prevalent, providing large datasets available for merged analyses, including health and medical datasets, genomics data, and social media- and technology-use data,” Young said in a recent CellPress article.

“These data can be modeled alongside other biomedical datasets and used to predict biomedical outcomes.”