“I got this call from my brother Stephen, and he said the news doesn’t look good. At that point, he’d been through enough processes to know what that meant – he had ALS. So I began this journey with my brother and my family…. We were thinking there had to be a way to make this about the patient. But it started like everyone else. You get that phone call, and your life changes.” – Jamie Heywood, Co-Founder

Recently, we launched a new and improved About Us page that included a short video about our company history. Now, we’re pleased to unveil a longer, more in-depth video that allows you to hear our founding story from four PatientsLikeMe executives and learn what drew each of them to become a part of our groundbreaking concept.

Tune in below to hear where it all started and why, five years later, we’re committed to continuing the journey we’re all on – as a company, as patients and as family members of those affected by disease.

You can also watch this insightful piece (~15 minutes) in three smaller segments:  Chapter 1, Chapter 2 and Chapter 3.

The research team is very proud of how our team has grown in 2010 and the impact we’ve made in the academic community.  In 2010 alone, PatientsLikeMe and our work were mentioned in scientific literature more than 133 times.  All of this is because of what you share with us.

Yesterday, we highlighted some of the research work we’ve done in 2010 across our four newest communities.  Today, we’ll highlight our older communities.  Below is also a highlights reel of some of this work.

HIV

• Throughout 2010, we discussed the goal and benefits to measuring your quality of life (QoL). This concept of measuring QoL started in our HIV Community at the end of 2009. Earlier this year in a blog and podcast, Researcher Michael Massagli Ph.D. discussed some of the insights that are being shared by HIV patients through the QoL survey. For instance, we found that the average physical, mental and social well-being score of patients with a CD4 count below 200 is significantly lower than for those of you with a count above 200.

Parkinson’s Disease

• The Parkinson’s Community has always excelled in reporting their health status through the Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (or PDRS). When answering the questions on this scale, members often asked us: “Should I respond when my drugs are working and I’m at my best (‘On’) or when my drugs aren’t working and I’m at my worst (‘Off’)?” Back in October, we released a brand new feature in the PD community that allows you to rate your symptoms as either “On,” “Off”, or in both conditions so now you can see the effect of your medications for yourself.

Multiple Sclerosis

• We hear a lot from you about the difficulty of adhering to medication. Early last year, our research team developed a new rating scale for patients with MS to assess the difficulties of sticking to their medication. We presented findings at the Consortium of Multiple Sclerosis Centers (CMSC), the main North American conference for MS specialist physicians, nurses, and researchers. The team is currently working on publishing these findings.

ALS

• Co-founder Jamie Heywood discussed our research into lithium in ALS at the TEDMED conference late in 2009. In early 2010, TEDMED released the video of his presentation where he shares our vision of the future of medicine. The team is currently working on publishing the lithium findings.
• PatientsLikeMe, in collaboration with researchers at Oxford University, discovered that when ALS patients get symptoms in their arms first, they’re most likely to get it in their dominant hand. This research was presented at the ALS MND Symposium and cited on this MND Research blog.
• We also collaborated with the Northeast ALS Consortium (NEALS) to examine the decision-making process that patients with ALS go through when considering whether or not to take part in research studies; this was published in the peer-reviewed journal Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis.

Here’s a short video highlighting much of the research you’ve helped us do in 2010.

Finally, I want to recognize how our team has expanded this year to better focus on what matters to you most.  Some new additions include:

• Brant Chee, Ph.D. – a specialist in natural language processing and detecting drug safety data in patient reported text
• Kate Slawsky, MPH – an outcomes researcher helping to develop custom surveys for our partners and our platform
• Shivani Bhargava – a research assistant supporting the team in ensuring our platform holds high-quality data about our patients

Thank you all for having a voice in research. There’s so much being learned from what you are sharing every day, and we are excited about what 2011 will bring.

The 20th International Symposium on ALS/MND took place (December 8th-10th) in Berlin, Germany. This is the 4th ALS Symposium attended by PatientsLikeMe, and certainly the most exciting in terms of new findings. The annual symposium is a tremendous opportunity for researchers from around the world to meet and share new developments – it’s the big event for the ALS research community and attracts scientists from across the globe.

PatientsLikeMe Chairman and Co-Founder Jamie Heywood and Research Scientist Timothy Vaughan, PhD presented three posters at the conference with some of the findings we’ve generated this year. The highlight was a poster describing our analysis of the patient-led study of lithium carbonate. Using new techniques that compared patients on lithium to carefully matched control patients, we determined that the drug had no effect on the progression of ALS. The poster was well received with good feedback from experienced experts in the field, and we are currently working on writing up a full analysis and description of our techniques.

Our second poster described a small survey we did about emotional lability, also known as pseudobulbar affect (PBA). We found that although many ALS patients suffer from unusual or uncontrollable outbursts of laughter, crying, or anger, patients aren’t discussing these episodes with their physicians.

Finally, we presented preliminary results from our Familial ALS Genetics Study. About 20 patients have told us about ALS-causing mutations they have, and so far, the data closely resembles other findings reported in the scientific literature. The PatientsLikeMe difference is that patients who know their mutations can find and connect with other patients like them for the very first time.

We’d like to thank our research team for all their hard work this year. And of course, we’d like to thank our patients for sharing their data and making each of these studies possible. Here’s to further understanding and continued breakthroughs in 2010!

Primary Lateral Sclerosis (PLS) and Progressive Muscular Atrophy (PMA) are two rare variants of the disease ALS. Normally, ALS affects the upper motor neurons in the brain and spinal cord, as well as the lower motor neurons that send signals from the spinal cord directly to muscles. PLS and PMA are different because PLS only affects the upper motor neurons, and PMA only affects the lower motor neurons. It’s an important distinction for patients to be told about because the prognosis is less severe in these conditions.  On average, survival in ALS is typically reported to be 2-5 years, whereas for patients with PMA it’s more like 5-10 years and for PLS it’s even longer (often several decades).

ALS itself is a rare condition, affecting some 30,000 people in the United States at any one time.  PLS and PMA each represent approximately 5% of the overall ALS community, so there’s approximately 1,500 patients with each condition in the U.S at any given time.  In April 2008, PatientsLikeMe added the ability for members of our ALS community to change their diagnosis to these rare conditions.  To date, we now have 182 patients with PLS and 270 with PMA. This is truly exciting because even the largest studies in the literature have only examined 40 or so PLS patients and a similar number of PMA patients. One of our most useful features on our site for people with ALS is the percentile curves, which we display as a backdrop on their profiles to put each individual’s rate of progression into context. However, as you can see in the figure below, when you compare the progression curves of ALS patients on our site with those of a typical PLS patient, the PLS patient progression deviates significantly from the ALS curves.

With so many PLS and PMA patients sharing such valuable information about their disease on PatientsLikeMe, we had enough information to generate a new set of percentile curves for each of those communities.  To do this, we used self-report ALSFRS-R (ALS functional rating score – revised) data from 104 PLS patients and 59 PMA patients that met our criteria for data quality. We have good data for the first 4-5 years of disease after onset, and after that point we rely on linear extrapolation to make the plots.  Here we see the value of openness in action.  When you see the potential value in contributing your data, it drives a virtuous cycle: the more data you enter, the more value you get, so you enter more data!

As any of our patients in these communities will tell you, being diagnosed with a rare disease can be a frustrating experience. Aside from dealing with the condition itself, there’s the lack of public awareness, a lack of research investigating your condition, and a sense that you are being “lumped in” with a similar disease because your community doesn’t have the critical mass to merit its own attention.  These new percentile curves for PLS and PMA patients demonstrate the value and power of openness.  By sharing their health data in an open fashion, patients are providing new insights that are changing how we think and act when it comes to these very rare conditions.

Note:  A potential limitation of these curves is that they represent the outcomes for patients that are members of PatientsLikeMe and may not be generalizable to the entire population; we are working hard to better understand and correct for the biases in our population and data. As the size and longevity of each community increases, we will be in a better position to address these issues.

In today’s issue of the journal Science two papers describe the discovery of a new gene for ALS (you can read the abstracts here and here). Around 90% of ALS cases are sporadic, i.e. we don’t know what causes them, but for 5-10% of patients the disease runs in their family (known as familial ALS, FALS). Until today, there was only one major causative gene that we knew about, called SOD1, which accounted for 20% of familial cases. Today’s new discovery of the gene FUS (also known as ALS6) accounts for an additional 3-5% of familial cases and was the result of an international collaboration between scientists in Boston, London, and Sydney. This is very exciting for research because the more we know about what causes ALS, the better our chances of finding an effective treatment through better understanding of the pathways involved in motor neuron degeneration.

Here at PatientsLikeMe, we’ve recently upgraded our ALS platform to capture data on familial ALS patients’ known genetic mutations. The goal is to help familial ALS patients find another patient like them, and to enhance understanding of the phenotype of each mutation, e.g. if different types of mutation cause a faster or slower disease progression. Ultimately our aim is to try and establish whether there might be any treatments that have a differential effect on patients with different disease-causing mutations. There are examples of this already known in other diseases; for instance the presence of absence of the Philadelphia chromosome in chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) predicts whether the patient will respond to the drug Gleevec. Although there is currently only a single effective treatment for ALS (Rilutek), there are a number of trials underway investigating the potential of drugs for patients with specific gene mutations.

The unique outcome data captured on the PatientsLikeMe platform also allows us to learn more about the nature of the disease for FALS patients with different genetic mutations. In the graph above you can see the average rate of progression for patients with three different FALS mutations; the common and aggressive A4V mutation (sadly average survival is ~18 months), the rarer recessive D90A mutation (much longer average survival of ~13 years), and a very rare and recently identified mutation of VAPB, referred to as ALS8. Collecting genetic data and combining it with high-quality patient-reported outcomes helps a patient to answer the question “Given my status, what is the best outcome I can expect to achieve, and how do I get there?”.

Note: If you have familial ALS and know your genetic mutation status please consider joining our ALS community and sharing your genetic information through your diagnosis history.

This blog post is the second in a series from our attendance at the 19th International Symposium on ALS/MND in Birmingham UK in November 2008. When PatientsLikeMe attended the previous ALS/MND Symposium in Toronto Canada in December 2007, I was given a platform presentation to show the assembled clinicians, scientists and researchers what we had developed for patients with the condition. This year, as part of a session on the history of ALS/MND patients online, I was given the opportunity to show attendees some of the improvements we had made to the site since that time.

* Percentile curves for patients with PLS - When I said that we had more than 100 patients with PLS registered on the site, there was a collective gasp from the audience. Our large sample has allowed us to show PLS patients how they compare with other PLS patients for the first time. (Available to PLS members of the ALS/MND community)

* Geomapping - Patients on our system can see a map of the world and see registered users nearby using a Google Maps API developed by our resident geomapping whiz Steve Hammond. This allows patients in isolated areas, or even busy cities, to find other patients like them who they might want to meet up with or talk to on the phone. (Available to users in all our communities)

* Treatment database - By integrating the Multum Drug Database into our treatment system, users are presented with an accurate list of possible dosages for the treatments they are taking. We have also added an evaluation system that lets users share their opinions about a drug’s efficacy, adherence, burden, and side effect profile. (Available to users in all our communities)

* Lithium study tool – We have showcased our custom lithium study tool in a number of recent blog posts, but for many delegates this was the first time they had seen the evidence we’ve been collecting on lithium in ALS/MND.

* Future state modeling - Simply “tracking” a patient’s progression has never been the goal for us; we’ve always wanted to take past information and use it to predict the future state of an individual patient. In relatively linear diseases like ALS, that means we can help patients to plan in advance for when they might need a wheelchair or other equipment. It’s often the case that ALS/MND patients don’t get the equipment they need until several months after they could have benefited from having it. Such a tool would give a customized prediction for the individual patient. After all, most of us don’t want to know about the “average” patient, we want to know about a “patient like me”!

Back in November, Jamie Heywood and I attended the 19th International ALS/MND Symposium in Birmingham, UK.  As part of an ongoing series of blog posts reporting from that conference, I have put together a narrated slideshow which is an abridged version of a platform presentation I was asked to give at the conference about the past, present, and future of the internet for patients with ALS/MND.

As you will see in the presentation, there has been a strong online presence in the ALS/MND world since the early 1990s. Over time, the proportion and representativeness of the patients participating has increased dramatically, to the point that we now have some 10% of the USA’s ALS/MND population registered on the site.

Next up in our series…a blog post looking at some of our recent improvements to PatientsLikeMe for people living with ALS/MND.

This year PatientsLikeMe was the major sponsor of the 18th International ALS/MND Symposium held in Toronto, Canada. Research scientist Paul Wicks, marketing officer Lori Scanlon, and community liaison Emma Willey were all in attendance to tell people about the site. We first started telling the ALS/MND community about us at the Yokohama conference in 2006, with Paul walking doctors and researchers through the site on a laptop. This year we decided to invest more in setting up an eye-catching booth which had people coming up to us to admire our space-age gadgets as much as to see the site!

Over the course of 4 days we spoke to hundreds of conference delegates. Many doctors had said that they had been invited to join the site by their patients and were curious to find out more. We were able to use our new Google Mapping feature to show them where their local patients were, which had people queuing to see who they knew that was registered on the site! Several researchers were also interested in forming collaborations and we hope to be able to get our users involved in more research over the coming year.The most common questions people had for us were:

- Do people really want to know about their progress?: Our answer would be that PatientsLikeMe allows them the option to find out if they choose. Many professionals feel that it is their responsibility to protect patients and carers from distressing information. However, we believe that everyone’s information-seeking preferences are different and by giving people the choice we are empowering them.

- Don’t you get a lot of people pushing their products?: We have a few ways of preventing this. First there is our community of members, who are a very switched-on group. If anybody posts something suspicious or overtly commercial we normally hear about it in a matter of minutes and are able to respond appropriately. Secondly we have a clear emphasis on sharing what has been helpful, but we ask people not to try and persuade others to change their regime; that is a choice for them to make. Finally, by giving patients the tools to look at each other’s outcomes, we encourage people to put their data where their mouth is. If “supplement x” has worked wonders for them, we would encourage them to enter in their data so other people can see for themselves.

- What does this cost patients?: Nothing! Because our business model involves partnering with pharmaceutical companies to encourage their participation in disease communities, we don’t have to rely upon advertising, spam, or subscription fees to sustain our activities. We feel that being a neutral space from the perspective of industry and non-profits is best for everyone.

- Can we tell our patients about this?: Sure! We’d like nothing more. In the new year we’ll be distributing leaflets to all the ALS/MND clinics we can find so that they can invite patients and caregivers to join us.

On the penultimate day of the conference, one of our research team, Paul Wicks, gave a platform presentation describing PatientsLikeMe and presenting some of the research that’s been carried out on the site.

His talk was met with an enthusiastic response and was identified as a highlight of the symposium by several delegates. Click the video below to hear Paul take you through his eight minute presentation.

Without doubt, one of the most inspiring parts of any conference is meeting up with our users, and we were thrilled to see a few of them at the conference. We heard how PatientsLikeMe helped them understand more about their condition, meet other users in their area, and made them feel like they were a part of the fight against ALS/MND. Next year the conference is in Birmingham, UK, and we look forward to having lots of ground-breaking research to show off there!

The first thing we experience about yawning is an urge to do so, one that can be so hard to suppress that we end up gulping down an extra serving of air when we’re trying to appear interested, or polite, or awake. But what if you yawned even if you weren’t tired, or bored? What if you got attacks of yawning six, seven, eight times in a row that you couldn’t stop? This can be a problem for some patients with ALS, and it’s made worse by the fact that due to weak jaw muscles they could dislocate their jaw.

That’s why I was particularly interested when a news report on PatientsLikeMe listed “increased yawning” as a symptom of ALS. It occurred to me then that we had in front of us the perfect way to investigate excessive yawning in more detail. The first step was to set up “excessive yawning” as a primary symptom in ALS, meaning that all new members would be rating whether they felt it was mild, moderate, or severe. Coincidentally, a paper had just come out which reported two patients (not with ALS) with excessive yawning after being prescibred an SSRI antidepressant drug. We now had a couple of different hypotheses we could test out; first that yawning in ALS was associated with respiratory funciton, second that it was associated with SSRI use, and third that it might be something to do with emotional lability. I took the new publication as an opportunity to write a letter to the editor on the subject. I wrote:

254 patients (47%) completed the survey on excessive yawning. Excessive yawning was reported to be absent in 75 patients (30%) mild in 75 (30%), moderate in 81 (32%), and severe in 22 (9%). Using Spearman’s Rho there was no correlation between severity of yawning and age (r = −0.63, P = 0.329, n = 244) months since diagnosis (r = −0.032, P = 0.619, n = 250), or the last recorded measurement of forced vital capacity (r = −0.136, P = 0.99, n = 148). There was no association between yawning severity and anti-depressant usage (χ² = 3.269, P = 0.352). However, there was an association between yawning severity and site of onset (χ² = 18.705, P = 0.028). Patients with a bulbar onset of disease were more likely (57%) to have moderate or severe yawning than patients with an arm onset (42%) or leg onset (31%).

So, from this data it looks like we can reject hypothesis one (breathing) and hypothesis two (SSRI use). But what about emotional lability? The reason I thought it might be a factor is that, much like uncontrollable laughter and crying, people yawned even when they weren’t sleepy and had difficulty with inhibition. Emotional lability is also found to be much more common in the bulbar-onset form of ALS relative to limb onset forms. Our own stats show a moderate but significant correlation between the two symptoms (r=~0.3) , and at the recent ALS/MND International Symposium in Toronto one of the speakers mentioned that they also consider yawning a sign of lability.

Why is all of this important? For one thing, the fact that yawning can be painful for ALS patients means we should try and stop it, but our discussions on PatientsLikeMe brought to light another reason entirely: people were losing friends because of it as they were intepreting their frequent yawning as a sign of boredom or rudeness! So, my interest now is for two things to happen; first for patients and healthcare professionals to be more sensitive to the presence of excessive yawning and clarify to patients that it can be a symptom, and second for researchers to investigate potential treatments that might target emotional lability and excessive yawning in order to improve the quality of life of our patients.

At PatientsLikeMe, we believe in getting to know the person, not just the “patient.” That’s why we’ve decided to interview a PALS each month to find out more about how he or she approaches life. This month we are pleased to feature Edwin, a three-star member.

What inspires you?
For me, it is not what but who, and the answers are completely different now than they were before my MND diagnosis, because prior to my diagnosis I let materialism rule my life. God inspires me in more ways than I can possibly say. With today’s technology we have the good fortune to not only be able to appreciate and enjoy all of the magic, splendors, and wonders of our own planet, but those of the universe too. Every morning I wake up and thank God for my creation/existence, knowing that this lifetime is an opportunity for me to experience, learn, and give, and that it is just “a blink of the eye” of my eternity. Many of my fellow humans on the planet inspire me. I speak of those who, without any hidden agenda, give of themselves for the betterment of others. I still have much to learn from these people as I strive (hopefully) to be like them.

What’s the funniest thing that has ever happened to you?
To set this up right, first you have to understand that while I enjoy having a good time, I’ve always been the kind of person (stiff) that has had to be in control at all times. Back in the early 1980s while we were living in Southern California, Patty (my wife/better half) and I were out on a Saturday driving around doing a bit of furniture shopping. I had an excellent sense for getting/driving around since at the time I was doing on-site computer fix-it stuff for a living. We had finished our shopping and were headed for home when I simply drew a blank on where I was and how to get home. So, I pulled to the curb, looked over at Patty and asked, “Where the hell am I, and how do we get home from here?” Think about it, guys never stop to ask for directions and here I was asking my wife! Through the years Patty has enjoyed telling this story to people that have gotten to know me. Of course now with what I have going, there will be plenty of opportunities along the way to ask for help and laugh about it (continuing learning opportunities/experiences for me).

What is your favorite place and why?
There is a stretch of road here in Colorado over in the southwestern part of the state that runs from Silverton to Ouray (part of US 550, also called the “Million Dollar Highway”). For some reason that I can not explain I have always felt closest to God when driving/riding this road. My intent when I’m gone is to have my ashes spread at Red Mountain Pass along this route.

What do you like best about PatientsLikeMe?
The fact that it gives all PALS the opportunity to share all of their experiences (profile of condition, treatments, and symptoms) while also providing an open forum for discussion and support of PALS and CALS. Who could possibly ask for more?

PatientsLikeMe, the leading treatment and outcomes sharing website for people with life-changing diseases, is proud to announce its first scientific poster award. Today, at the 20th anniversary meeting of the British Neuropsychiatry Association (BNPA), Dr. Paul Wicks, resident researcher at PatientsLikeMe.com received the Association’s first prize for the best poster presentation, entitled “Telesocial medicine for neurological disorders: PatientsLikeMe.com”.

“This is the first time that PatientsLikeMe.com has been formally presented at an academic conference and it’s great that the site has received the recognition it deserves,” says Dr. Wicks. “Over the two days of the conference I’ve spoken to neurologists, psychiatrists, and patients, all of whom were enthusiastic about the concept and interested in the development of the site as it branches out to include conditions as diverse as ALS/MND, Parkinson’s disease, and multiple sclerosis.”

The poster illustrates the power of PatientsLikeMe and how it can help patients with neurological disorders take control of their diseases and improve their understanding and knowledge of treatments.