During #24DaysofGiving this December, we’re highlighting all the good your health data donations are doing. And this time, we’re starting at the beginning.
As you probably know already, PatientsLikeMe launched its first community in 2006 for people living with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Two years later, we had an amazingly engaged and research-focused community who were willing to share data to change what the world knows about ALS. This neurodegenerative condition is fatal and takes away people’s ability to walk, speak, use their arms, and eventually breathe. This is exactly what happened to our founders’ brother, Stephen.
So, in 2008, when the results of an Italian clinical trial were published in a highly respected scientific journal saying that the use of lithium carbonate could slow the progression of ALS, we had a member community that was hungry to learn more. Spearheaded by two very involved members – a Brazilian ALS patient named Humberto and a caregiver in the US named Karen – we set out on a journey to collect and analyze thousands of patients’ real-world data to understand how lithium carbonate was working beyond the clinical trial setting. The result was unexpected and unmatched in the world of medicine.
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