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.

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.