ALS Awareness 2010: A Four Year Journey With Our PALS

Four years ago this Spring, PatientsLikeMe launched the ALS community with very specific goals in mind – to help patients like you take control of your disease, share and learn from one another, have a voice in real-world research and inform the companies that make your drugs and can improve your care.  Together, we have come so far as a community in making those goals, those dreams happen.  Today, to close out ALS Awareness Month, we want to honor that journey by highlighting some of the milestones you as a community have achieved.

As many of you know, the journey started when PatientsLikeMe was inspirstephensprofileed by Stephen Heywood, a young man diagnosed with ALS when he was only 29 years old. His brothers Jamie and Ben, and long-time friend Jeff Cole, built PatientsLikeMe and its flagship ALS community to help Stephen and other patients like him. After four years since launching the ALS community, more than 4,500 of you – our PALS – are still sharing your data and experiences to help others. Along the way, we’ve lost some of our friends, including Stephen, but their contributions live on in the data they’ve shared with us to help further the understanding of this disease.  Jamie recently said it this way: “the desire is that this disease should no longer kill, but we do our best to help people live with it today.”

Thank you for living with it today and sharing those experiences with your fellow PALS, industry, researchers…all of us.  You are truly making a difference.

  • Spring 2006: The ALS community launches!
  • February 2007: PatientsLikeMe wins its first scientific award for a poster describing our work in ALS at the British Neuropsychiatry Association AGM in London, England.
  • July 2007: Your contributions lead to PatientsLikeMe’s first scientific discovery. PatientsLikeMe publishes a paper in Acta Psychiatica Scandinavica showing that some PALS experience uncontrollable bouts of excessive yawning; an unusual symptom twice as common in the bulbar-onset form of the disease compared to those with a limb-onset.
  • December 2007: Your sharing of real-world experiences helps PatientsLikeMe make a big splash at the International ALS/MND Symposium in Toronto, Canada. The team gives its first platform presentation to show off the website, and your health data, to ALS researchers, scientists, and clinicians.
  • February 2008: An Italian study finds that the drug lithium carbonate slows the progression of ALS. Many of our PALS begin taking the drug, and so with your help, PatientsLikeMe embarks on our own observational study of the drug by launching a novel tool on the site.
  • May 2008: Your voice in research is heard loud and clear.  PatientsLikeMe publishes its first survey in the European Journal of Neurology, showing that while 90% of PALS were warned about physical symptoms of their condition, only 10% were warned about possible psychological consequences, and two-thirds wanted to be told.
  • November 2008: PatientsLikeMe’s Paul Wicks and Jamie Heywood once again attend the International ALS/MND Symposium to give an overview of the history of ALS online, and present our very first findings from the lithium study. Even though we were only presenting preliminary data, there was a lot of buzz about this new and interesting approach to conducting research – with you, the patient, in the driver’s seat. We also gave a few sneak-peeks at upcoming features for the site.
  • December 2008: PatientsLikeMe and some of our fellow PALS are spotlighted in  two major media stories (CBS Evening News with Katie Couric and BusinessWeek) helping to raise awareness about ALS.
  • April 2009: Following the discovery of another gene for ALS in February, PatientsLikeMe adds the ability for patients to enter and use their own genetic test results to find other patients like them with our genetic search feature.
  • May 2009: In response to a request from one of our patients, Cathy Wolf, the PatientsLikeMe research team carried out a study to extend the scale, something we call the ALSFRS-EX (Extension), which helps capture functional changes in patients with advanced ALS.
  • August 2009: Thanks to you, PatientsLikeMe now has the largest dataset of patients with Primary Lateral Sclerosis (PLS) and Progressive Muscular Atrophy (PMA) online than ever recorded before. We shared this data back to the community through an upgrade to our ALS charts.
  • October 2009: The ALS community and all that you’ve shared is the focal point of Co-founder Jamie Heywood’s powerful talk at TEDMED, called “The Big Idea my Brother Inspired.”  In the presentation, he describes the creation of the site, preliminary results of the lithium experiment and shows some of our most advanced tools still in development.
  • December 2009: The power of sharing your health data is highlighted in the PatientsLikeMe presentation at the 20th International ALS/MND Symposium in Berlin where the PatientsLikeMe research team unveiled our next round of analyses on the lithium study.  The team also presents preliminary results of our genetics tool, and berlin-lithium-poster-207x3001a commercial project exploring emotional lability in ALS, undertaken with our partners Avanir Pharmaecuticals  (see “how we make money“).
  • January 2010: PatientsLikeMe rolls out new profile charts in the ALS community to help you, the patient, understand your own profile better and tell your story more effectively.
  • April 2010: PALS continue to team up to raise awareness and money for ALS research online and off.  This video highlights your participation in the PatientsLikeMeinMotion(TM) program.
  • May 2010: This month we see the release of a study carried out in collaboration with our partners at the NEALS Consortium investigating some of the barriers to research participation that some of you may experience.  Additionally, all your contributions to the lithium study have been collected and analyzed by now, and the PatientsLikeMe research team submits it for peer-review publication to a leading journal.  Thanks to you and your peers, this final paper highlights the potential of new ways of collecting and analyzing data in ALS to advance clinical trials and find faster cures.
  • May 2011: Just imagine…

PatientsLikeMe member pwicks

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3 thoughts on “ALS Awareness 2010: A Four Year Journey With Our PALS”

  1. I read every step of this article and am so proud to say I have been on board since almost the beginning and lived the growth of this site. I have watched the enthusiasum and concern for each members wellbeing become a daily routine. Thank you for what you have provided to not only the patients in the different catagories but their livlihood through research as only you can do it….I wish you many more years of success and innovation, for together as a team ( patient and PLM )Neurological Disorders are in Big Trouble….love as always pokie

  2. Superb website you have here but I was curious about if you knew of any user discussion
    forums that cover the same topics talked about in this article?
    I’d really like to be a part of group where I can get feedback from other experienced people that share the same interest. If you have any suggestions, please let me know. Thanks!

  3. We sure do, Pete! Come on over to http://www.PatientsLikeMe.com, where others are talking about treatments, research, coping, and more. Since this blog post was written, we’ve opened up the site to anybody with any condition.

    Let me know if you have any questions, I’m here to help.

    Best wishes,
    Liz, PatientsLikeMe Community Manager

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