Coala Life recently announced the results of the groundbreaking RedHeart Study where the Coala Heart Monitor (“Coala”) was used to evaluate 821 women with palpitation symptoms for over 60 days. Goals were to determine to what degree direct feedback of the underlying heart rhythm, such as provided by the Coala through its instant ECG analysis, could help to reduce symptoms caused by palpitations and increase health-related quality of life (HRQOL).
The study demonstrated that the use of ECG with instant feedback during symptoms decreased the degree of palpitation symptoms, decreased levels of depression and anxiety, and increased HRQOL in women. Furthermore, it was shown that palpitations in women are rarely caused by arrhythmias of clinical importance.
“The RedHeart study proves the efficacy of the Coala and its real-time ECG for long-term remote monitoring and helping patients that suffer from common heart palpitations. The study results are enlightening for the many women with palpitation issues that often cause anxiety and as research has shown, are often challenging to being correctly diagnosed by healthcare providers,” comments Dan Pitulia, CEO of Coala Life.
Participants were recruited digitally and remotely from all over Sweden with different socioeconomic backgrounds in the age span of 20-88 years. Participants responded to validated questionnaires related to symptoms, anxiety and depression, and HRQOL before and after 60 days monitoring.
Over 200,000 individual ECG tracings were generated by the 2-lead Coala and automatically analyzed by algorithms. The entire study was carried out remotely, including recruitment and inclusion of all participants without having to meet any healthcare staff.
The prospective, observational RedHeart study was conducted by researchers and physicians at Karolinska Institutet and Karolinska University Hospital, Stockholm, Sweden. The results were published on behalf of the European Society of Cardiology in the March 2021 issue of the European Journal of Cardiovascular Nursing.
