Have you heard about the petition launched to the White House asking for all federally funded research to be freely accessible over the Internet? We’ve signed it and here’s why…

Today, government-funded research (that’s research paid for with your tax dollars) is often something you can have access to in published scientific journals, but for a charge.  The petition is a call to action for the current Administration to make this research open to anyone who wants to read it — study participants, other patients, researchers, healthcare providers, industry, students, or anyone at all.

Under the Administration’s new “We the People” policy, if the petition gets over 25,000 signatures within 30 days, the White House will issue a response. At the end of day two, there are already over 10,000 signatures! (Anyone can sign, even those internationally.)  You can read more about this open access movement and see what others are saying with the twitter hashtag #OAMonday.

Simply put, we believe this campaign represents the power of Openness. At PatientsLikeMe we’ve long believed in the power of open access and take steps to ensure many of our publications such as our recent epilepsy user survey, our lithium study in Nature Biotechnology, and most of our other published research is all freely available without needing to be an academic researcher. Why? Because patients like you want to read the most up-to-date scientific research and we believe you have the right to do so without impediment.

So, we’ve signed the petition.  Have you?

“In the UK, there’s a saying that e-patients have about their healthcare decisions: ‘Nothing about me, without me.’ There’s no better example of the disconnect between academic medicine and patients than a research study *about* patients that they can not read.”
- Paul Wicks, PhD, R&D Director, PatientsLikeMe (Signature #817)

“We call on patients, caregivers, family, and friends to sign this petition and send a clear message that life-saving research paid for with tax dollars is a public good and should be shared in the same spirit with which altruistic patients like you sacrificed their time, wellbeing, and sometimes even their lives.”
- Ben Heywood, President and Co-founder, PatientsLikeMe (Signature #4473)

Please meet Parkinson’s disease (PD) patient Judith, who led a PatientsLikeMeInMotion-sponsored team at the Parkinson’s Unity Walk in New York City last April.  Held annually in Central Park, this massive grassroots event donates 100% of funds raised to PD research.

Congrats to Judith and all of our PatientsLikeMeInMotion-sponsored teams for your efforts to raise funds and awareness for your condition. We’re honored to support you every step of the way.  For more PatientsLikeMeInMotion team photos, check out our Flickr gallery.

Thinking about organizing a team for next spring?  Learn more about the PatientsLikeMeInMotion program today.

With more than 82,000 patients on PatientsLikeMe, there’s a lot of information being shared with one another.  Last month, we highlighted how your sharing affects the experience of many on our site (One For All series).

Today, we continue that theme by taking a look at information being shared across all of our communities that many of you may have in common. Can you guess how many of you are on similar treatments or experiencing similar symptoms even though you are in different communities? Read on to find out.

DID YOU KNOW…

• Of the members who have reported their age, more than 8,000 of our of you have indicated you’re under 30-years old and more than 12,000 are 55-years old or older.
• Approximately 31% (or 27,013) of patient members across all communities experience depression.

How are you treating your condition?

• You report using more than 4,500 treatments for your conditions, including prescription drugs, supplements, over-the-counter medications, medical devices, life-style modifications, therapies, etc.
• One of the top lifestyle modifications reported by our members is heat avoidance; and physical exercise is the #1 exercise cited.
• The most widely used prescription drugs reported across communities include Gabapentin (Neurontin), Glatiramer acetate (Copaxone) and Duloxetine (Cymbalta).
• The top 3 supplements reported by all patients are Vitamin D, Omega 3 Fish Oil and Multivitamins.

What are your major symptoms?

• The 5 most common primary symptoms reported include fatigue, anxious mood, depressed mood, pain and brain fog.

What are you talking about?

• Some of most frequently “tagged” topics in the forum include research, symptoms (e.g., pain), SSDI (Social Security Disability Insurance), coping strategies and side effects.

A special thank you to all of our members for continuing to share your data and experiences to help others just like you.

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 PatientsLikeMe research and development (R&D) team is excited about what we can all share and learn in 2011.  Here’s a look back at some of what patients like you shared with us, and what we then shared with the world, in 2010.

The R&D team published and presented some unprecedented insights based on what you shared with us this year.  In addition to attending and presenting at some noteworthy conferences in 2010, we also published a series of blogs and podcasts pulled together just for you.

Based on your feedback, the R&D team also implemented some changes to the medical architecture that will help improve the research we do, as well as your experience as a patient on the site.  Ultimately, we are working to develop tools that help you answer the question: “Given my status, what is the best outcome I can hope to achieve and how do I get there?”

Today and tomorrow, we’ll be highlighting some of the work we’ve done in 2010 focused on various communities.  Today, we start with the following (listed from newest to oldest community):

Organ Transplants

• Researcher Catherine Brownstein MPH, Ph.D. presented a poster at the American Society of Nephrology (ASN) Renal Week in Denver. We compared the profile of our Transplants Community to published data from the UNOS/OPTN databases and found that about half of our patients knew about the exact degree of tissue matching they had with their donor. We found the fewest mismatches in organs that had come from deceased, rather than living donors. We also found that within the living donors the closest matches came from siblings, followed by parents, children, and then any other relative.

Epilepsy

• In December, the team attended the annual American Epilepsy Society (AES) conference and presented a poster comparing our data to the Pharmetrics insurance claims database. We found that our Epilepsy Community is a little more likely to be female, more likely to be in their 20s-40s, and that they are more likely to be taking multiple anti-epileptic drugs than the broader epilepsy population. Exploring the biases in our data set and being transparent about them is one of our core values as a science team.
• PatientsLikeMe is running an ongoing patient-reported outcomes (PRO) study with UCB to measure the physical, social and mental well-being of people with epilepsy over time. By the end of 2010, members of our Epilepsy Community had completed more than 1,300 PRO surveys. Thanks to all of you who contributed.

Fibromyalgia

• The R&D team recently blogged about a report comparing our Fibromyalgia Community to the wider fibromyalgia population and revealed we are now able to declare with confidence that our community very closely matches the fibromyalgia community at large.
• In 2010, we published a study entitled “Sharing Health Data for Better Outcomes on PatientsLikeMe” in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR). The study, conducted across several of our communities, established a link between sharing health data and benefits experienced on our site. The fibromyalgia-specific findings were that 21% of fibromyalgia members of our site strongly agreed or agreed that they had changed physicians as a result of using PatientsLikeMe, higher than the rate in MS (15%), mood (10%), Parkinson’s (9%), HIV (8%), or ALS (6%).
• In response to popular demand for more research in fibromyalgia, the R&D team has also started reaching out to members of the scientific community to design research studies to take place in early 2011.

Mood

• Looking again at the JMIR study specifically within the Mood Community, we found 26% of users agreed or strongly agreed that using the site had reduced thoughts about self harm; 23% agreed they had decided to start therapy or counseling after interacting with others on the site; and 22% agreed they needed less inpatient care as a result of using PatientsLikeMe.  Here’s a video where I present some of these results, and give a walk-through of the Mood Community, at the UMASS Medical School’s Psychiatry Grand Rounds this year.
• We also recently introduced a new tool in all of our communities called “InstantMe” to help you put your experiences in context.  Based on the feedback we received from members of our mood community about the pilot tool (called “InstantMood”), it is now available for everybody.
• In response to popular demand for more research in mood, the R&D team has also started reaching out to members of the scientific community to design research studies to take place in early 2011.

More highlights, including a video, coming tomorrow.

Our recent series entitled Share and Compare focused on how patients like you can better answer the question, “How do I put my experience in context?” The answer, in part, comes from how much information you share to help create that context of real-world patient experiences.  Think of it this way – with every piece of information you share, you are contributing directly to research.

When we’re conducting research, one of the things we look at is how similar or different you are to the populations at large.  We even have minimum criteria for a person’s data to be usable.  For example, if you indicate whether you’re male or female, you make it that much easier in determining how you “fit in.”  That one piece of information helps us know if our population is in fact representative of a disease, or whether we’re only getting one specific type of patient (e.g., males with fibromyalgia who don’t have much pain).  If we do get more of one type of patient, it becomes more difficult to draw any conclusions from that population and apply them to the general public.

So, you may be wondering why we need to compare to the published literature/general public?  Why can’t we just say that our conclusions apply to our users and leave it at that? The answer to this question has many parts:

1. We have the ability to positively impact everyone with disease, not just our current members.  Ideally, we will apply knowledge gained through research in our communities to all people living with diseases.
2. From a research perspective, we have to know our biases, and how to correct for them if possible. For example, we tend to have more women than men in our populations.  By knowing that, we can “correct” for it in our analyses by making sure our proportions are correct when we look at a sample of users.
3. We can know how our discoveries fit in with other information known about a disease.  For example, let’s say we figure out that patients who have had fibromyalgia for 15+ years improve their quality of life by doing Treatment X.  If we don’t know how many patients have had fibromyalgia for 15 years or how many do Treatment X and don’t improve, the discovery loses some of its power from lack of context.  Perhaps it isn’t a discovery at all!  However, if we have data from our community to answer those questions and can compare it to published literature, we can trust more in our discoveries.

Here’s a great example of what can happen with the data you share.  Recently, we evaluated our fibromyalgia community characteristics with the Demographics Survey sent out early in 2010.  For some of our communities, the survey had fantastic results.  We are now able to declare with confidence that our community very closely matches the fibromyalgia community at large (Table 1).

By maintaining your profiles and keeping accurate records of side effects, medications, background information, and outcomes (such as quality of life), you are participating in groundbreaking research that is already yielding fantastic results. Our research team has presented at prestigious conferences and written dozens of abstracts and papers. Working together, PatientsLikeMe has discovered new symptoms and compared treatment efficacy; we are also working towards creating an accurate picture of how medications work in the real world so you get the right treatment for you. This is just beginning.

In honor of this month’s Mental Illness Awareness Week, here’s a snapshot of what’s happening in our PatientsLikeMe Mood community. Launched in 2008, the community now has more than 18,000 patients. Below are some interesting facts about the community, so please read and share on!

DID YOU ALSO KNOW…

• You can search for patients under 15+ diagnosis categories, including depression, bipolar, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety, addiction to tobacco, addiction to alcohol, eating disorder and more.
• In a PatientsLikeMe research study recently published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, we revealed:
  • 26% of responding mood community members agreed or strongly agreed that using the site had reduced thoughts about self harm
  • 23% agreed they had decided to start therapy or counseling after interacting with others on the site
  • 22% agreed they needed less inpatient care as a result of using PatientsLikeMe.  (See our “Patient Voice” report, video and member interview on inpatient therapy).
• Members’ experiences on the treatment Amitriptyline was used in an award-winning paper presented at Medicine 2.0 last year.

How are our members treating their condition?

• Patients are using more than 1700 treatments, including prescription drugs, supplements, over-the-counter medications, life-style modifications, therapies, and more.
• The top lifestyle modification reported by our patients is positive self talk; and sleep is the #1 exercise cited.
• The most widely used prescription drugs reported by members are Lamotragine, Clonazepam and Bupropion; the top 3 supplements are Omega 3 Fish Oil, Multi-Vitamins, and Vitamin D.

What are their major symptoms?

• The 5 most common primary symptoms reported include: Back Pain, Dizziness, Headaches, Hyperventilation, and Muscle Tension.

What are they talking about?

• Some of the top topics “tagged” in our forum discussions to date include specific treatments (like Lamictal, Lithium, Wellbutrin and Seroqul), as well as borderline personality disorder, coping, anger and journaling.

Our research team here at PatientsLikeMe carries out world-class research in collaboration with academic centers, commercial partners (see “how we make money“), and to help answer questions from our patients. We share our findings with the world through this blog, peer-reviewed publications, and by attending academic conferences like the Consortium of Multiple Sclerosis Centers (CMSC) annual conference. This meeting, now in its 24th year, is for neurologists, nurses, researchers, and other healthcare professionals involved in MS to share their knowledge, network, and form new research collaborations.

In collaboration with our partners at Novartis, our MS community recently participated in a research study exploring the reasons why people don’t always take their disease-modifying therapies as prescribed. Adherence to medication is a big issue in chronic conditions; although we all mean to take our meds as prescribed by physicians, good intentions can fall by the wayside when real life interferes with our plans! Decreased adherence could lead to less medication efficacy, more relapses, and a higher burden of disability for MS patients.

By exploring the messages posted in our vibrant MS forum, and carrying out a review of the scientific literature, we constructed a new questionnaire called the “MS Treatment Evaluation Questionnaire” (MS-TEQ) that sought to explore and quantify the barriers that get in the way of people taking their DMTs as prescribed. As part of the validation process we also showed the questionnaire to some local MS patients to ensure it was easy to understand. In December of 2009, we sent out an invitation to 1,209 carefully selected patients and asked them to complete the MS-TEQ. Within just two weeks, we had complete responses back from 442 patients, a 37% overall response rate.

The MS-TEQ addresses three areas: 1) MS-TEQ Barriers: the barriers faced by patients that stop them from taking their meds as prescribed (e.g., forgetting), 2) MS-TEQ SEs:  the side effects they experience (e.g., injection site reactions), and 3) MS-TEQ Cope: coping strategies they use to try and cope with these side effects (e.g., using an ice cube to reduce pain and itching). Our analysis found that for every 10 points on the MS-TEQ Barriers scale, patients did not take 10% of their medication as prescribed. However, we also found cause for hope; every coping mechanism they used to try and ameliorate their DMT side effects had a positive effect of 4% on the proportion of their DMTs that they took as prescribed.

At the conference’s poster session, we got a lot of interest from attendees and gave away all of our handouts and copies of the questionnaire, so you might be seeing the MS-TEQ in a clinic near you any day now! Our hope is that the questionnaire will help patients and their healthcare providers to understand why someone is struggling to take their medication as prescribed, and to give them a way of measuring this over time. We are currently preparing a manuscript to submit to a peer-reviewed journal to share our findings with the rest of the academic community.

Do you have trouble taking your MS disease-modifying therapies as prescribed? Check out our treatment database. Thousands of our members have written evaluations of the drugs used in MS, including advice and tips on how to stay adherent to your medication to improve your outcomes.

Last week the PatientsLikeMe R&D team published a study entitled “Sharing Health Data for Better Outcomes on PatientsLikeMe” in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR), the leading open access peer-reviewed journal on health care in the Internet age. The study aimed to find out direct from our users how they were using the site and whether the information they’d learned was helping to influence their interactions with healthcare providers, their decision-making, and ultimately their outcomes. Because JMIR is an open-access journal, you can download the whole paper for free here, but here are some of the highlights from the 1,323 patients that completed the survey:

• Almost all of our patients (94%, N=1,249) were diagnosed when they joined the site; an important factor in joining a community of “patients like me”
• The majority of members (72%, N=952) agreed that the site was helpful for learning about a symptom they have experienced (check out our symptom reports to see what they’re learning!)
• Many respondents (57%, N=757) agreed that the site had helped them to understand side effects of their treatments (check out our treatment reports to find out more!) and 42% (N=559) found the site helpful in finding another patient with experience of taking a specific treatment for their condition
• Patients who used the site more perceived more benefits. We gave each patient an “engagement score” from 0-4 based on how many features of the site they’d used; we found that the higher the participation, the higher the benefit. Correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causation though, so it could be patients who share more get more out of it, or it could be that patients who have already benefited from the site are more willing to participate. Interesting hypothesis for a follow-up perhaps?
• Nearly a third of patients (29%, N=388) had printed out their profiles and shared them with their doctor; two thirds of users (66%, N=871) said their healthcare team were supportive of them using the site. More controversially, we were interested to find that overall, 12% (N=151) said they had changed their physician as a direct result of information received from PatientsLikeMe; that number was twice as high in fibromyalgia (21%)!
• In the spirit of openness we also made available (in de-identified form) all of the open comments we received at the end of the survey on how we could improve the site, both positive and negative.

This was the first study to quantify the potential benefits that users of the site can experience; we hope to discover more about how these change over time and what benefits are perceived by users of our newer communities such as epilepsy and organ transplants.

As 2009 comes to an end, we want to take this opportunity to thank all of our members, partners and general fans for another great year.   Here’s a recap of some of the exciting happenings at PatientsLikeMe these past 12 months.  Wishing you all a Happy New Year!

Community Milestones
This year, the 15+ disease communities at PatientsLikeMe became an online home to more than 50,000 members.   The fibromyalgia community was expanded this past fall to include patients with chronic fatigue syndrome, and we announced a new community scheduled to launch early next year for people with epilepsy.  In addition to celebrating our communities’ awareness days and months within the site and right here on the blog (including Fibromyalgia Awareness Day, MS and PD Awareness Months, National HIV Testing Day and World AIDS Day), many of our members also participated on PatientsLikeMe teams in walk/run efforts to raise awareness and money in the name of their disease.  Congrats to the 40+ teams walking at events to support non-profit organizations like ALS Association, National MS Society, NAMI, Parkinson’s Alliance, APDA, and the MS Society of Canada. The real-time sharing and learning happening on PatientsLikeMe was also highlighted in the report series called The Patient Voice (starting with inpatient therapy for people with Mood conditions).  Check out highlights from all these programs on these videos from the Fibromyalgia, Parkinson’s, Multiple Sclerosis and Mood communities.

Many of our members have also become fans of PatientsLikeMe on Facebook.  Here are a few quotes posted to our Facebook page in ’09:

“I find this site so beneficial in looking for the tools to cope with the disease. People post research and real-life patient experiences of current trials and treatments. Hope is a major focus of PLM and I encourage others to join. We are strong in numbers and we have a voice.”

“PLM is a wonderful way to express what and how to live with this disease. It has changed my life for the better, have met wonderful individuals and we have shared, cried and grown by reaching out and expressing from our hearts, have made wonderful friends and have learned so much.”

Research Updates
If you haven’t checked out our research page or subscribed to Google Scholar alerts (92 articles referred to us in 2009!), here’s what you’ve been missing…

This year our ever-growing research team continued their analysis of the real-world data being shared by patients like you.  Awarded the inaugural JMIR award at Medicine 2.0, the PatientsLikeMe research team published pieces on compulsive gambling in patients with Parkinson’s disease in Movement Disorders, expanding the gold standard rating scale in advanced ALS in European Journal of Neurology, and “The power of social networking in medicine” in the highly respected journal Nature Biotechnology.

Throughout the year, the team has also shared insights via videos (like this series on the history of ALS or a recap of a study on the antidepressant Amitriptyline) and various presentations (such as an overview of our work at the at Eurordis AGM in Athens and updates on our lithium study at the International ALS/MND Symposium).  In addition to working on the development of our new communities, the team took additional steps to incorporate genetics into the PatientsLikeMe platform.  By participating in new partner studies (such as 23andMe and NEALS) and utilizing new product upgrades, including the launch of the Genetic Search Engine, patients are learning more about their condition and coming closer to answering the question:  “Given my status, what is the best outcome I can expect to achieve, and how do I get there?”

Keep your eyes out for more to come in 2010 as our R&D team rolls out more insights and outcomes measurements (like the Quality of Life scale in HIV), more improvements to the PatientsLikeMe platform, and cutting edge research in the peer-reviewed scientific literature.

The Business Side
As Ben said in a recent blog post, “we can’t have a business without you [the patient] and our communities can’t exist to help patients without a business.”  Throughout the year, the PatientsLikeMe executive team traveled around the world to present to industry partners, researchers, healthcare professionals and government leaders about the power of real-world patient data-sharing.  Here are some highlights from ’09:

• Partnerships: Earlier 2009, PatientsLikeMe announced partnerships with biopharma leader UCB to launch an epilepsy community next year and personal genomics company 23andMe to help people with Parkinson’s.

• Government: Piloted in our MS community this year, PatientsLikeMe members now have the ability to voluntarily report adverse events directly to the FDA; in fact, Jamie recently presented about adverse event reporting at an open FDA hearing on the “Promotion of FDA-Regulated Medical Products Using the Internet and Social Media Tools.”  PatientsLikeMe was also one of the collaborating organizations responsible for writing the Declaration of Health Data Rights and launching HealthDataRights.org this past June.  Finally, Jamie testified before the National Committee for Health and Vital Statistics, and gave an exciting rapid-fire presentation on the future of medicine at the Gov 2.0 Summit.

• Innovation: As a leader in Health 2.0, PatientsLikeMe executives are often asked to speak at various industry events.  Check out photos of Ben speaking at The National Summit and stay tuned for videos from Jamie’s presentation at TEDMED and David’s presentation at Bil:Pil.  You can also tune in to our live event tweets on the PatientsLikeMe Twitter account in 2010.

• Media Highlights: PatientLikeMe members, data and executives were also featured in media mentions throughout 2009, including WIRED, Forbes, U.S. News & World Report, Fox Business Live, Newsweek, New York Times, as well as Seed magazine, Nature Biotechnology and Neurology Today.

Happy New Year!
- The PatientsLikeMe Team

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!

Earlier this Fall at Medicine 2.0, PatientsLikeMe was honored to receive the inaugural Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) Award for our paper on what we can learn about drugs post market from patients reporting treatment experiences on PatientsLikeMe.

Once a drug is on the market, it can be difficult to evaluate how it’s working in the real world for different kinds of people using it for different purposes. In this paper, our research team examined how we can learn from collecting the experiences from individual members scattered around the world into a single database. The study focused on Amitriptyline, a medication used widely and for a variety of purposes, and reports on why patients take it, the efficacy of the drug, its side-effects and associated burden.

To see patients’ real world experiences with a specific treatment, like Amitriptyline, you can browse the thousands of treatment reports shared on PatientsLikeMe.  You can also view a summary of our Medicine 2.0 presentation here or below to learn more about this study.  The full paper will be published in 2010, so stay tuned!

PatientsLikeMe made the following announcement last night at the TEDMED conference.  For more on Jamie Heywood’s presentation, check out what people are saying on Twitter.

- – - – - – -

PATIENTSLIKEME ADDS ONLINE COMMUNITY FOR PEOPLE WITH CHRONIC FATIGUE SYNDROME
Researchers Use Open Medical Network to Measure Real-World Impact of XMRV Virus

Cambridge, MA–October 30, 2009–PatientsLikeMe (www.patientslikeme.com), the leading online community for people with life-changing conditions, announces the expansion of its fibromyalgia community to welcome patients with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), also know as myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME). By sharing information about their experience with CFS, patients can now find others just like them, including other patients who may have the newly discovered xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus (XMRV). The purpose of this expansion is for PatientsLikeMe to research the impact XMRV has on CFS patients.

“With 1 million patients diagnosed with CFS, and potentially 10 million Americans who could be infected with the XMRV virus, there is an unique opportunity to use the power of our open medical network to understand this illness and accelerate the validation and development of new biomarkers and treatments,” says Jamie Heywood, co-founder and chairman of PatientsLikeMe.

There are currently more than 7,000 patients, many who have CFS, in the PatientsLikeMe fibromyalgia community sharing meaningful data for researchers to analyze about the condition. As part of this expansion, the PatientsLikeMe platform will allow patients who test positive for XMRV to indicate that on their profiles, much how ALS and Parkinson’s patients can now add their genetic information.

Adds David S. Williams III, head of business development at PatientsLikeMe, “This discovery may spur research into the efficacy of anti-retrovirals for patients with CFS, which could have a dramatic impact on the $10 billion market for these medications.”

Heywood will announce the new CFS community on stage at the health technology conference TEDMED in San Diego, CA today. CFS marks the 17th condition available to patients on PatientsLikeMe, which now boasts more than 45,000 patients sharing health data on treatments, symptoms and outcomes. The company’s next community for people with epilepsy is scheduled to launch in early 2010. More about PatientsLikeMe partnerships can be found on its partner site: http://partners.patientslikeme.com.

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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.