Short-term physical exercise impacts on the human holobiont obtained by a randomised intervention study.

BACKGROUND: Human well-being has been linked to the composition and functional capacity of the intestinal microbiota. As regular exercise is known to improve human health, it is not surprising that exercise was previously described to positively modulate the gut microbiota, too. However, most previous studies mainly focused on either elite athletes or animal models. Thus, we conducted a randomised intervention study that focused on the effects of different types of training (endurance and strength) in previously physically inactive, healthy adults in comparison to controls that did not perform regular exercise. Overall study duration was ten weeks including six weeks of intervention period. In addition to 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing of longitudinally sampled faecal material of participants (six time points), detailed body composition measurements and analysis of blood samples (at baseline and after the intervention) were performed to obtain overall physiological changes within the intervention period. Activity tracker devices (wrist-band wearables) provided activity status and sleeping patterns of participants as well as exercise intensity and heart measurements. RESULTS: Different biometric responses between endurance and strength activities were identified, such as a significant increase of lymphocytes and decrease of mean corpuscular haemoglobin concentration (MCHC) only within the strength intervention group. In the endurance group, we observed a significant reduction in hip circumference and an increase in physical working capacity (PWC). Though a large variation of microbiota changes were observed between individuals of the same group, we did not find specific collective alterations in the endurance nor the strength groups, arguing for microbiome variations specific to individuals, and therefore, were not captured in our analysis. CONCLUSIONS: We could show that different types of exercise have distinct but moderate effects on the overall physiology of humans and very distinct microbial changes in the gut. The observed overall changes during the intervention highlight the importance of physical activity on well-being. Future studies should investigate the effect of exercise on a longer timescale, investigate different training intensities and consider high-resolution shotgun metagenomics technology. TRIAL REGISTRATION: DRKS, DRKS00015873 . Registered 12 December 2018; Retrospectively registered.

Acceptability Criteria of Precision Medicine: Lessons From Patients' Experiences With the GUIDE-IBD Trial Regarding the Use of Mobile Health Technology.

Background: Research about mobile health technologies for inflammatory bowel diseases reveals that these devices are mainly used to predict or self-report disease activity. However, in the near future these tools can be used to integrate large data sets into machine learning for the development of personalized treatment algorithms. The impact of these technologies on patients' well-being and daily lives has not yet been investigated. Methods: We conducted 10 qualitative interviews with patients who used the GUIDE-IBD mHealth technology. This is a special smartphone app for patients to record patient-reported outcomes and a wearable to track physical activity, heart rate, and sleep quality. For data analysis, we used interpretative phenomenological analysis. This method is ideally suited for studying people's lived experiences. Results: The analysis of the data revealed 11 themes that were mentioned by at least 3 participants. These themes were: Self-tracking with wearable devices as normality; variable value of the data from the wearable; risk of putting people under pressure; stimulus to reflect on their own well-being and illness; risk of psychological distress; discussion about app data in the medical consultation is very brief or nonexistent; easier to be honest with an app than with a doctor; questionnaires do not always adequately capture the patient's condition; need for support; the possibility to look at the data retrospectively; and annoyed by additional tasks. Conclusions: Patients identified benefits, risks, and potentials for improvement, which should be considered in the further development of the devices and patient-reported outcome scales, and in the implementation of usual care.

Patient Reported Outcomes in Chronic Inflammatory Diseases: Current State, Limitations and Perspectives.

Chronic inflammatory diseases (CID) are emerging disorders which do not only affect specific organs with respective clinical symptoms but can also affect various aspects of life, such as emotional distress, anxiety, fatigue and quality of life. These facets of chronic disease are often not recognized in the therapy of CID patients. Furthermore, the symptoms and patient-reported outcomes often do not correlate well with the actual inflammatory burden. The discrepancy between patient-reported symptoms and objectively assessed disease activity can indeed be instructive for the treating physician to draw an integrative picture of an individual's disease course. This poses a challenge for the design of novel, more comprehensive disease assessments. In this mini-review, we report on the currently available patient-reported outcomes, the unmet needs in the field of chronic inflammatory diseases and the challenges of addressing these.