Recently, our ALS community mourned the loss of Persevering, a highly proactive three-star member who was known for his unfailing efforts to support fellow patients, record and share data, report website problems and recruit ALS clinical trial participants. Offline, he was also a tireless advocate for ALS awareness and research, attending conferences and lobbying on […]
Leaving a Legacy of Data at PatientsLikeMe Read More »
Welcome to the third installment of our new blog series featuring patient bloggers. Last week, we introduced you to Parkinson’s blogger Steve, and today, we’d like you to meet Rachael, a three-star member who has been a part of PatientsLikeMe’s flagship ALS community since the very beginning. In fact, she joined PatientsLikeMe in May 2006,
Spotlighted Blogger: ALS Patient Rachael of “Notes to Self” Read More »
“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
A Little More About Us: A Look Back at the Founding of PatientsLikeMe Read More »
May is ALS Awareness Month. To help spread the word about this progressive neurodegenerative condition, which affects approximately five out of every 100,000 people worldwide, we wanted to tell you a little bit about our patients with ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis). Due to our founders’ personal experience with this disease, ALS was the very first
Raise Your Awareness of ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) Read More »
This month marks the 3-year anniversary of our flagship ALS community. While there have been so many exciting milestones we’ve reached in that time, we’re always looking at ways to bring new insight to this disease. Today, we’re announcing the launch of our Genetics Search Engine for people with ALS. Imagine finding other patients just
Announcing the PatientsLikeMe ALS Genetics Search Engine Read More »
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,
A new gene for ALS: What sharing your genetics could mean for research Read More »
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
ALS Symposium 2008: New features for ALS patients Read More »
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
ALS Symposium 2008: A history of ALS online Read More »
PatientsLikeMe members share health data on the site adding their own individual-level health experience to a repository of structured outcome data. The result? An unprecedented data set that informs medical conversation not only within the patient community but also with the larger scientific one. Earlier this fall, the venue for this conversation was the annual
Structuring and Presenting the Patients’ Perspective at AMIA Read More »
PatientsLikeMe, the leading treatment and outcome sharing community for people with life-changing conditions, has released the most comprehensive real-world treatment and symptom dataset on ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) and Multiple Sclerosis (MS). Previously, similar real-world information would have had to be mined and aggregated from proprietary sources such as hospital systems or insurance companies. Now,
