The Value of Openness: The PatientsLikeMe Blog

Though documented as long ago as the early 1800s, medical breakthroughs in Parkinson’s disease research have been slow in coming.  That’s why PatientsLikeMe continues to get involved in the research process.  With our new genetics engine for Parkinson’s disease, patients now have a way to share information about their genetics and find others with the same genetics as them.  As part of our commitment to supporting genetics discovery, PatientsLikeMe recently partnered with 23andMe, aiding them in their research effort to get 10,000 Parkinson’s patients for a groundbreaking research study.

Most of the time, people don’t know what causes their Parkinson’s disease.  It could be due to genetic factors we haven’t identified yet, environmental exposures, or maybe even something else completely.  However, there are some known genetic causes of Parkinson’s disease. Sometimes different genetic mutations have different disease characteristics, so there’s some benefit to knowing what mutation you may have.  For example, different genetic mutations can result in an earlier or later onset for Parkinson’s disease, some have a milder or more severe disease course, and others have a higher or lower chance of dementia.  Knowing your genetic status could help you plan ahead, especially if you have a strong family history of the disease.

The 23andMe kit tests for one genetic mutation that can cause Parkinson’s disease - LRRK2 G2019S.  The chances of having this mutation vary with your ethnicity, and not everyone with the mutation will get Parkinson’s disease. However, some studies claim that LRRK2 G2019S is responsible for about 5-6% of all familial cases of Parkinson’s Disease and 1% of sporadic (randomly occurring) cases of Parkinson’s disease.

We are working to include as much meaningful genetics information in the PatientsLikeMe Parkinson’s community so that you can make the best decisions collaboratively. For those PatiensLikeMe Parkinson’s community members taking advantage of the 23andMe offer, we encourage you to upload your genetic information on your PatientsLikeMe profile so we can continue to expand our understanding of genetics and Parkinson’s in the context of individual patients.  If you go to your 23andMe account and find that you have the LRRK2 G2019S mutation, you can add it to your PatientsLikeMe diagnosis history.  Once you have entered your genetics to your profile, you will be “findable” by other “patients like you” with the same genetics. The PatientsLikeMe research team is excited about learning more about Parkinson’s with your help. Sharing information will help us all learn as much as we can about the disease.

We do not live our lives alone. We live our lives in collaboration with others. We communicate our needs and our goals, and together we work to achieve them. This is exceptionally true for families and individuals dealing with illness. Whether you’re dealing with depression, or pain, or perhaps the fear and stigma of HIV, or the impairment that comes from MS, Parkinson’s or ALS, what helps us the most is when those around us reach out and share their support and advice.

You would think that your ability to share would be as much your right as speech, but is it? It’s not clear that is true in healthcare today, nor is it clear that such a right will be protected tomorrow. Privacy is also a right – a right to not share what you do not want shared. It’s a fair and just expectation that the doctors and clinicians you employ to support you in your illness will not share your information without your permission. Today, I fear that privacy has become much more than a right; it has become a goal. When that happens, people begin to find ways to make it difficult to share in the name of privacy.

More than once we have been asked by people in the medical system whether patients are allowed to share information with each other like they do on PatientsLikeMe. In fact, in some countries you can read their rules in a certain way and reasonably deduce that this type of sharing is not allowed. It is vitally important that we do not let this become a reality in the U.S.  There are some that would take away your right to share because they do not believe you are competent to weigh the risks and benefits of sharing, and make a sound decision. Imagine being forced to sign a document before you email a friend on PatientsLikeMe with a question about a symptom? This could be a possible consequence of ill intentioned privacy legislation.

We are working to ensure that sharing is preserved as a right. We know that you share with us, and each other, because you trust that we will do the right thing with that knowledge. At PatientsLikeMe, we are working hard to ensure we earn your trust every step of the way. To do this, we focus our energies on ways to help discover new things about each disease here and support the research system. We do this in the spirit of openness espoused in our Openness Philosophy. We work to be transparent about our business model and our decisions, and try to be accessible to you to answer your questions as you participate in our communities.

It remains our hope that you are wowed like we are about what is possible when we work together to make our healthcare system, and our lives, better. We have seen so much healing between all of you here on PatientsLikeMe, and it is because we are all sharing together – not alone.

PatientsLikeMe was recently asked to testify before the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services National Committee for Vital and Health Statistics (NCVHS). The NCVHS Subcommittee on Privacy, Confidentiality and Security is responsible for exploring these aforementioned issues as they relate to healthcare, and ran a 3-day hearing to spur informative dialogue about the future of e-healthcare. I was honored to represent PatientsLikeMe, and the thousands of patient members of our communities, as I testified on all of our behalf at that hearing.

As I said in the hearing, openness is what is and can help patients. It’s what matters. We believe in the concept called “The Network Patient” - an approach that puts patients first by giving you what you need to know when you need to know it, and empowering you to act on that information. As members of PatientsLikeMe, you have chosen to embrace openness and take control of your health. You volunteer your health information, your experiences, your life - all in an effort to improve your care, support others, and move research forward.

Here are a few excerpts from our prepared testimony statement that expand on privacy, openness and the future of our health system.

“From our experiences at PatientsLikeMe, we know patients are aware of the issues. They understand and weigh the risks and benefits, and are intelligently making rational choices about where they are comfortable sharing information and how their information will be used to help. If we infringe on this right to share or speak (in the interest of preventing discrimination), we are preventing the flow of information and, by our read, acting contrary to the values on which our country was founded.

Privacy is also more than a legal concept, it is also a philosophical concept. A modern focus on privacy as a goal, not as a right, has moved the line to the point that medicine is slowed, treatments are delayed, and patients die for failure to have what they need when they need it. We have substituted real harm for mostly theoretical harm. We would even argue that the philosophical focus on privacy is a bad thing. We believe that openness is much more powerful concept than privacy in medicine, and one that gives patients the power to take control of their health…

We have to begin to work on building a society that allows the variation in human health and the variation in human condition, one that allows people to be philosophically created equal. We need to work on building a society where information is not used to discriminate, but to assist and support and improve. Restricting the flow of information will not advance solving this problem.

This is not a simple transformation, but we believe it is inevitable. The major privacy issues are not only about health records, but the invisible trail of “breadcrumbs” we leave behind us day to day in life. Health is not a separate concept. It is an integrated concept and, in an integrated world, we have to decide how to build a society that can handle the reality that not all are healthy. We need to work together to get the most productivity and life from all of us.

We believe openness can lead the way to such a society.”

The full testimony is available here and posted to the NCVHS website (along with audio archive of the 5/20/09 hearing). A transcript will also be made available soon. These hearings, and of course our blog, are open to the public for comment on these issues. In the spirit of sharing, please share your thoughts with us here.

Despite some recent happenings in the news, we’re here to assure you that health 2.0 is still very much alive.  Here’s our recent announcement about our new partnership with 23andMe.

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PatientsLikeMe, the first community-based personalized medicine platform for people with life-changing conditions, and 23andMe, the world’s leading personal genomics company, announce a partnership today to help people with Parkinson’s disease.  PatientsLikeMe is teaming with 23andMe on its effort to recruit 10,000 people with Parkinson’s for a massive study of the disease, and give patients a way to learn more about their personal genetics.

“Today, technology is moving faster than the research establishment,” says James Heywood, co-founder and chairman of PatientsLikeMe.  “We are excited to see what happens when you give patients the ability to see variations of their disease and compare it to their own, while enabling them to easily define their personal genomics.”

More…

PatientsLikeMe was once again a proud sponsor of the 15th Annual Parkinson’s Unity Walk, held in New York City on Saturday April 25, 2009. On a gorgeous but hot day in Central Park, Jeana Frost, James Kebinger and I (Maureen Oakes) joined thousands of walkers and sponsors in raising more than $1.2 million for Parkinson’s research. As Lori said last year, “Unity” is the perfect word to describe this event. People from all over the world came together for a common cause and the results were staggering!

Getting to meet PatientsLikeMe members in real life is always a treat, and this year we saw old friends and met some new faces too! For me, one of the highlights was getting to see the amazing quilt made up of squares created by our PD members. Not only is it a stunning piece of craftsmanship, but it represents the spirit of collaboration that is so central to PatientsLikeMe. Members from across the country, many of whom have never met each other, shared their own artistic talents in their individual squares and the final product represents their collective strength, wisdom and passion. It was a great symbol of the power of our PatientsLikeMe community and all their efforts this Parkinson’s Awareness Month.

Great work Team PatientsLikeMe!

When most people think of Parkinson’s disease (PD), they think of a shuffling gait, a shaky hand, and slowness of movement. As awareness has increased of the non-movement symptoms of PD, such as hallucinations and depression, we’ve seen the psychological consequences the disease can have too. More recently, studies in the scientific literature have been reporting on cases of excessive gambling in patients with PD, sometimes associated with the use of dopamine-agonist drugs such as pramipexole (brand name: Mirapex).

In the Parkinson’s disease community on PatientsLikeMe, we came across several accounts from distressed members who had suddenly acquired a significant gambling problem. One member wrote:

“I am spending a lot of money that i should not spend.  I wake up thinking about the lottery, I daily purchase lottery tickets, scratch offs, and often wish that I could get on the bus to go to the casinos… Help me before I spend all of our little savings.”

We set out to investigate further, setting up a research collaboration with Dr. Graeme MacPhee of the Parkinsons Disease Non-Motor Group (PDNMG) and Southern General Hospital (Glasgow, Scotland), who has carried out studies in this area in the past. Although previous studies had associated problem gambling with dopamine-agonist drugs, we wanted to find out if gambling might be elevated in other patients with a neurodegenerative movement disorder; maybe gambling was just an outlet for boredom or something that someone with physical disabilities could take pleasure in as a hobby. Therefore, we used a control group from our ALS community. Because users of our site are, by definition, web users, we were also interested to see if our users were more likely to be using online gambling websites than other reports in the literature. Finally, we wanted to know more about what was driving patients’ gambling behavior.

Because of the size and levels of engagement in our patient communities, we were able to receive responses from more than 400 patients in about a week. Normally, a study of this size would take several years and a team of researchers to carry out, showing the potential power of sharing and openness.

What did we find?

• We found a higher level of problem gambling in our PD population (as defined by the South Oaks Gambling Scale) than previous studies; 13% of PD patients as opposed to previous estimates of around 4%.
• Patients with ALS were much less likely to gamble; only 3% of ALS patients scored above cutoff for having a gambling problem, compared to estimated rates of 0.25-1.7% in the general population.
• The average “problem gambler” with PD had spent nearly $3,000 on gambling in the past 12 months, and an estimated $24,000 in their lifetime.
• The most common forms of gambling behavior were the lottery, slot machines, or visiting a casino. Gambling online using the internet was uncommon; only 2% of PD patients reported ever having gambled online, and just 2 out of 27 problem gamblers with PD.
• PD patient with problem gambling were more likely than ALS patients with problem gambling to say that their gambling was distressing or out of their control.
• In our study, problem gamblers with PD were no more likely than non-gamblers to be on a dopamine-agonist drug.

We were interested to find that our study produced a higher estimate of problem gambling in PD than previous studies. It could be that our population is biased or unusual in some way; we have a slightly higher proportion of young-onset PD patients, who may be more prone to gambling. We also suspect that people are more willing to admit to distressing or embarrassing behavior issues in an anonymous online survey as opposed to discussing it in the doctor’s office.

As more of these cases have come to light, warnings about compulsive behavior have appeared on the label of dopamine-agonist drugs such as Mirapex.  It is the responsibility of everyone involved in the care of people with PD to warn them of the risks. The more patients like those in our community share their real-world experiences of treatments and side effects, the more researchers, drug-makers, doctors, and other providers can learn to help minimize the risks and maximize their quality of life.

Wicks P, MacPhee G (In press) Pathological Gambling amongst Parkinson’s Disease and ALS patients in an online community (PatientsLikeMe.com), Movement Disorders Read the rest of this entry »

It’s Parkinson’s Awareness Month. As we continue to spread the word about this condition, we wanted to tell you a little bit more about our PatientsLikeMe Parkinson’s community. Launched two years ago this month, the community has steadily grown to include more than 3,400 patients. Below are some interesting facts about the community, as well as an interview with one of our members (”PokieToo”) giving her real-world experience of living with condition.

WHAT’S IT LIKE LIVING WITH PARKINSON’S DISEASE (PD)?
Meet PokieToo.  A long-time member of our PD community, she tells us how she continues to “look for the sunshine” while “taking 30 pills a day.”   “Out there for the next person,” PokieToo gives us a glimpse of the real-world experiences of living with Parkinson’s disease.

DID YOU ALSO KNOW…

• More than 1,500 of our patient members are 50-yrs old or older
• 140+ of our patient members have inherited Parkinson’s disease (PD), and a handful of people have the less common drug-induced Parkinsonism and Vascular Parkinsonism
• Approximately 10% of our patient members (or 331) are Young-Onset Parkinson’s patients; that is, they report having experienced their first symptom before the age of 40.

How are our members treating their condition?

• Patients are using more than 1200 treatments, including prescription drugs, supplements, over-the-counter medications, medical devices, life-style modifications, therapies, etc.
• The top lifestyle modification reported by our patients is physical exercise;  and walking is the #1 exercise cited.
• The most widely used prescription drugs reported by members are Carbidopa-Levodopa (Sinemet), Pramipexole (Mirapex) and Rasagiline (Azilect)
• Top 3 supplements: CoQ10 Coenzyme Q10, Multivitamins and Omega 3 Fish Oil

What are their major symptoms?

• For more than 1,300 patient members, a “tremor” was their first symptom of the condition.
• The 5 most common primary symptoms reported include: Stiffness/Spasticity, Slowness, Fatigue, Excessive daytime sleepiness (somnolence) and Insomnia.

What are they talking about?

• Some of the top topics “tagged” in our forum discussions to date include specific treatments (like Sinemet, Mirapex, Deep Brain Stimulation/DBS and Exercise), symptoms like tremors and depression, as well as other hot issues like SSDI (Social Security Disability Insurance), the annual Parkinson’s Unity Walk, stem cells, clinical trials and research.

Did you know this April is both Parkinson’s Awareness Month and the 2-year anniversary of the PatientsLikeMe Parkinson’s community?  We invite you to celebrate with us all month as we share real-world patient insights and experiences of living with this disease…and we ask you to share on!

The PatientsLikeMe Parkinson’s community has come a long way since it launched in April 2007 - topping more than 3,400 patient members in just 24 months.  Our community members share so much about themselves on a daily basis - from details about how they manage their condition to their personal experiences and stories.  Why share?  Simply stated, to learn more about themselves while helping others better understand this condition.   In the spirit of awareness and sharing, this month we’ll share with you some of what we’ve learned so far from these inspirational individuals and keep it real with some personal patient stories about living with PD.

Additionally, later this month, PatientsLikeMe is once again sponsoring the Parkinson’s Unity Walk (www.unitywalk.org), “the largest single-day fundraising event for the Parkinson’s community.”  The event, which brings together thousands of people touched by Parkinson’s, takes place every spring in New York City’s Central Park.  PatientsLikeMe members from all over the U.S. will once again be meeting in New York to walk together as a team.  (Check out some of our onsite interviews with PatientsLikeMe members from the 2008 Unity Walk and keep an eye out  for 2009 highlights).

Stay tuned for more from us as the month unfolds. Until then, what else is happening this year for PD Awareness Month? Share your events or PD news in the comments below!

PatientsLikeMe believes in the benefits of openly sharing health information.  That is why we are happy to spread the word about National Family History Day, which had its fifth anniversary on Thanksgiving 2008.

As families gather this holiday weekend, National Family History Day encourages families to become familiar with the health history of previous generations.  At PatientsLikeMe, we encourage everyone to take advantage of the family time to identify, discuss, and make a written record of family health problems.  Many health disorders such as ALS, Parkinson’s, Multiple Sclerosis, heart disease, stroke, and diabetes, run in families and across generations. Knowing your family history gives insight into your current health status, and lifestyles and environmental factors that may affect your disease risk.

While there is talk of personalized medicine being on the horizon, collecting and interpreting family history information is a currently available, and practical personalized health tool. Health care professionals can use this valuable information to design individualized care programs to reduce risk of disease and promote overall health.

So while you’re eating that feast and the leftovers this weekend, ask your family about their health history.  It’s good conversation and can help everyone.  Happy National Family History Day!

Most people think of Parkinson’s disease (PD) as a condition of aging, and most of the time they’re right. Looking at the population as a whole, about 1-2% of people over the age of 65 have PD, and it’s usually a condition that is most severe in patients in their 70’s and 80’s. However, about 10% of patients buck this trend and experience their first symptoms before the age of 40; these patients are known as Young-Onset PD or YOPD for short. The R&D team here at PatientsLikeMe recently carried out a research study examining an aspect of PD that has only recently gained much attention, “non-motor symptoms.” When a clinician diagnoses PD, they are usually looking for a triad of cardinal features, specifically tremor, slowness, and stiffness. However, in the past 5-10 years it has been increasingly clear that patients with PD also experience a number of non-motor symptoms, ranging from dizziness to constipation, from a loss of sense of smell to hallucinations, and from apathy to urinary problems.

Several of our members had mentioned in forum postings that they were finding non-motor symptoms, such as cognitive confusion and fatigue, to be a particular burden, so we decided to carry out a research study using the well-validated Non-Motor Symptoms Questionnaire (NMS-Quest) developed by Professor Ray Chaudhuri and colleagues. We sent the survey out to all of our PD patients earlier this year. In total, we got responses from 307 patients, including 260 “classic” PD patients and 46 with YOPD. The results show a higher number of non motor symptoms among YOPD patients (14/30) than PD patients (11/30). That’s an average of three more non-motor symptoms for YOPD patients than their older counterparts. More specifically, YOPD patients (at the individual level) report apathy, concentration problems, falls, pains, and sadness more often than older onset PD patients.

You can listen to a short presentation, or read our full report for a more detailed analysis of our methodology and findings, but there were several points I found particularly interesting.

• It’s unusual enough to have YOPD, which can be an isolating and confusing experience. For YOPD patients to experience even more non-motor symptoms than patients with more typical PD seems alarming, and requires urgent attention from clinicians, researchers, and patient advocacy groups to ensure their needs are being met.

• This sentiment is echoed in some of the patient interviews we conducted with members earlier this year. Click here to view the first in a series of interviews to be posted on our YouTube page, and hear for yourself what YOPD patients had to say when we asked what people should know about PD. (More videos to come on our YouTube and Facebook pages, so stay tuned!)

• YOPD patients are more likely to still be working, to be supporting families, and to be looking after young children or parents. Therefore, even minor changes in cognitive function or mood could have a substantial impact on their ability to function.

• Because YOPD patients are relatively rare and spread out, researchers aren’t often able to gather sufficiently large samples to study them in detail. A research platform like PatientsLikeMe provides an ideal opportunity to collect high quality data in an efficient way.

PatientsLikeMe was a proud sponsor of the National Parkinson’s Foundation Young-Onset Parkinson’s Network (YOPN) Conference in Atlanta, GA last week.

The event, coordinated by and for people living with Young-Onset Parkinson Disease (YOPD), was a huge success. Paul Wicks and I (Maureen Oakes) enjoyed working at the booth, meeting many of our current members and spotting PatientsLikeMe t-shirts in the crowd. Paul was a presenter at the conference, and his session “Taking Control of Your Parkinson’s by Sharing Online” was well attended and received by current and future PatientsLikeMe members. One of the themes that came up repeatedly at the conference is that living with YOPD, like any other life-changing illness, can be a very isolating experience. The YOPN Conference presented its attendees the opportunity to spend the weekend learning more about their condition, expanding their knowledge about the latest treatments and choices, and most importantly, meeting other patients like them.

As a community manager at PatientsLikeMe, much of my job is watching. I read the forum to observe what people are discussing, I look for questions and ideas on how we can improve different areas of the site, and watch as members learn and relationships grow. But, one of my favorite things to watch is when our members meet each other in real life. As they did at the Unity Walk, many PatientsLikeMe Parkinson’s members wore “badges” with their usernames and pictures to help identify each other as they met their online friends face-to-face for the first time. These relationships blossom very quickly because they are rooted by their shared experiences, and that is a wonderful thing to watch.

Are you on Facebook? We are! Simply search for “PatientsLikeMe” to find our new company page. Once there, click “Become A Fan,” and a “My Pages” link will be added to your profile. Remember, Facebook is an open platform that anyone can view and isn’t part of PatientsLikeMe. Therefore, any information you share about you is open to the 100 million Facebook members. Thanks for spreading the word about us to your Facebook friends.

Currently, our Facebook page features photos from the AIDS Walk Boston, which drew over 20,000 participants and raised $1.2 million. We were proud to be a sponsor of the Wellness Festival that accompanied the successful June 1st event. Where can you see us next? We’re a sponsor of the National Parkinson’s Foundation’s 6th Annual Young-Onset Parkinson’s Network Conference, August 7th-9th in Atlanta, Georgia. Staffers Paul Wicks, a speaker at the conference, and Maureen Oakes will be present.

PatientsLikeMe was a proud sponsor of the 14th Annual Parkinson’s Unity Walk in New York City this past Saturday (April 26, 2008). Jeff Cole, Kate Brigham, Maureen Oakes and I (Lori Scanlon) were all onsite working at our sponsored booth. The event, which raised more than $1.3 million in donations this year, brought together thousands of people with Parkinson’s, their families and friends, support groups, non-profits and sponsoring organizations — all dedicated to advancing research and helping find a cure.

I said this onsite and I’ll say it again: The energy at the event was absolutely intoxicating! In addition to meeting hundreds of people who stopped by our booth to learn more about PatientsLikeMe, we were thrilled to finally meet some of our very own Parkinson’s Community members (and their families) face-to-face for the first time.

“Unity” is the perfect word to describe this event. We got to literally see thousands of people in the same place with the same goal, and it was nothing less than inspiring. We got to meet our members, who not only share their health information and experiences so openly on our site, but also opened their arms to welcome us “in”…it touched us all truly and deeply. We got to “feel the love,” as our members wore badges to represent those members who couldn’t be there. We then came home and read forum posts from the many more members who were at home watching us on the webcast and cheering on the walkers.

Here are a couple of many photos from the Unity Walk. Please take it all in. There was sunshine. There was energy. The smiles. The laughs. The love. The purpose. Can you feel it? Can you feel the (comm)unity? Good. Now, please pass it on…

This month marks the two-year anniversary of our flagship ALS community. It’s amazing to reflect on what we’ve achieved in just two short years. Not only did we build the world’s largest treatment and outcome sharing communities for ALS (1,800+ patients), MS (4,500+ patients) and Parkinson’s (1,300+ patients), but this year we began evolving into the powerful research platform we always envisioned we could be.

At the heart of this research initiative are our new community reports, which analyze the makeup of our patient communities. In January, we released our first MS Community Report covering factors such as first symptoms, age of diagnosis, disease type, etc. Recently we released our ALS Community Report, with the Parkinson’s Community Report to follow shortly. You can find the much-anticipated results on the blog as well as the ALS forum.

But that’s just the beginning. Your commitment to collaborative learning has now driven our evolution to the next level. On March 7th, we launched the ALS Lithium Study. As co-founder Jamie Heywood wrote in a recent blog entry, “Today, we allow patients to begin to answer how to treat ALS.” What could be more central to our mission than that? We are delighted to collaborate with Humberto Macedo, a patient, and Karen Felzer, PhD, whose father has ALS, on the study. “Together…we will run the first real-time, real-world, open and non-blinded, patient-driven trial,” wrote Heywood.

The question at hand is: Does lithium slow ALS? With almost 150 patients participating to date, we already have more than eight times the number of participants as the most recent published study about lithium and ALS. Stay tuned as this exciting and unprecedented study continues. As always, thanks to everyone - whether involved in the study or not - for sharing your treatment data. You made this study possible, and we intend for it to be the first of many across our communities. The age of patient-led research is here!

Finally, we are thrilled to announce the March 23rd launch of our beta community for Mood Conditions, which coincided with the New York Times Magazine article, Practicing Patients. If you know anyone affected by Mood Conditions such as depression, bipolar disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) or anxiety, please invite him or her to join PatientsLikeMe today.

It’s been six months since we launched our first newsletter, and a lot has happened at PatientsLikeMe in that time. With the holiday season now upon us, we thought we should give thanks for the amazing strides made in all our communities. There is power in numbers, as they say, and we are grateful to every new member for increasing our ability to effect change.

ALS Community
We are proud to announce that our flagship ALS community has grown by nearly 50% in the last six months to 1,450 patients. We’re even prouder that it now attracts the equivalent of 10% of all newly diagnosed ALS patients in the US. To share what researchers can learn from this model for openness, our own Paul Wicks, PhD, will present a lecture on social medicine at the upcoming 18th Annual Symposium on ALS/MND, which we are co-sponsoring. Please stop by the PatientsLikeMe booth if you’ll be there!

MS and Parkinson’s Communities
Launched in late spring, our MS and Parkinson’s communities have also experienced staggering, if not meteoric, growth. We are delighted to report that our MS community recently hit a major milestone when it surpassed the 2,000-member mark(!) while our Parkinson’s community now has more than 800 members. We welcome and thank all of these new members. Please keep inviting others to join! This vast pool of shared data is what will help make PatientsLikeMe a juggernaut in MS and Parkinson’s research.

HIV Community
The PatientsLikeMe family continues to expand as our newest community, HIV, began accepting charter members last month. We expect to formally launch early next year, and we look forward to growing this fledgling community to its fullest potential. Please help us in this effort. If you know anyone affected by HIV, please invite him or her to join PatientsLikeMe today.