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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Digit. Health
Sec. Health Technology Implementation
Volume 6 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fdgth.2024.1430994

Impacts on study design when implementing digital measures in Parkinson's disease-modifying therapy trials

Provisionally accepted
Jennie S. Lavine Jennie S. Lavine *Anthony Scotina Anthony Scotina Seth Haney Seth Haney *Jessie P. Bakker Jessie P. Bakker *Elena Izmailova Elena Izmailova Larsson Omberg Larsson Omberg *
  • Koneksa Health, New York, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Parkinson's Disease affects over 8.5 million people and there are currently no medications approved to treat underlying disease. Clinical trials for disease modifying therapies (DMT) are hampered by a lack of sufficiently sensitive measures to detect treatment effect. Reliable digital assessments of motor function allow for frequent at-home measurements that may be able to sensitively detect disease progression. Here, we estimate the test-retest reliability of a suite of at-home motor measures derived from raw triaxial accelerometry data collected from 44 participants (21 with confirmed PD) and use the estimates to simulate digital measures in DMT trials. We consider three schedules of assessments and fit linear mixed models to the simulated data to determine whether a treatment effect can be detected. We find at-home measures vary in reliability; many have ICCs as high as or higher than MDS-UPDRS part III total score. Compared with quarterly in-clinic assessments, frequent athome measures reduce the sample size needed to detect a 30% reduction in disease progression from over 300 per study arm to 150 or less than 100 for bursts and evenly spaced at-home assessments, respectively. The results regarding superiority of at-home assessments for detecting change over time are robust to relaxing assumptions regarding the responsiveness to disease progression and variability in progression rates. Overall, at-home measures have a favorable reliability profile for sensitive detection of treatment effects in DMT trials. Future work is needed to better understand the causes of variability in PD progression and identify the most appropriate statistical methods for effect detection.

    Keywords: Parkinson's disease1, Digital health technology2, Measurement reliability3, clinical trials4, Statistical power5, disease progression6, Longitudinal data7, Simulation study8

    Received: 11 May 2024; Accepted: 12 Sep 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Lavine, Scotina, Haney, Bakker, Izmailova and Omberg. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence:
    Jennie S. Lavine, Koneksa Health, New York, United States
    Seth Haney, Koneksa Health, New York, United States
    Jessie P. Bakker, Koneksa Health, New York, United States
    Larsson Omberg, Koneksa Health, New York, United States

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.