Your data doing good: The Lithium study

During #24DaysofGiving this December, we’re highlighting all the good your health data donations are doing. And this time, we’re starting at the beginning.  As you probably know already, PatientsLikeMe launched its first community in 2006 for people living with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Two years later, we had an amazingly engaged and… Continue reading Your data doing good: The Lithium study

Life with Bipolar I Disorder: What We’ve Learned

Yesterday, our interview with bipolar blogger Andrea gave you a glimpse into what it’s like to live with bipolar I disorder.  Today we take a deeper look into this mental health condition using the data and experiences shared by our 1,237 bipolar I members. First off, however, you may have heard of something called bipolar… Continue reading Life with Bipolar I Disorder: What We’ve Learned

Spotlighted Blogger: Bipolar patient Andrea of “Lithium and Lamictal”

How do we know we’re truly living in a Health 2.0 age?  Recently, we’ve discovered that a number of PatientsLikeMe members have fascinating blogs chronicling what it’s like to live with their respective health conditions. For example, we told you in August about the acclaimed gastroparesis blog “My Broken Stomach,” written by one of our… Continue reading Spotlighted Blogger: Bipolar patient Andrea of “Lithium and Lamictal”

Giving Health Statistics a Good Name

Mark Twain popularized the notion that there are three kinds of lies: “lies, damned lies, and statistics.” But there’s a cure for bad statistics, and that cure is openness. When our study of the effects of lithium in ALS was published in Nature Biotechnology, we not only presented the usual background and analysis, but we… Continue reading Giving Health Statistics a Good Name

PatientsLikeMe Refutes Published Clinical Trial

Congratulations to our R&D team here at PatientsLikeMe for its most recent paper published in Nature Biotechnology (“Accelerated clinical discovery using self-reported patient data collected online and a patient-matching algorithm”).  The full paper has been made available by Nature so you can read the results and access all of the supplemental data and figures. Below are… Continue reading PatientsLikeMe Refutes Published Clinical Trial

Share Your Data to Untangle ALS!

Our ALS Community recently broke the 5,000-member mark, making it the largest of its kind in the world as well as the ideal platform for expedited research.  And that’s just what we’re working on. Since the community’s launch in 2006, we’ve conducted a number of research studies, both internally and in collaboration with leaders in… Continue reading Share Your Data to Untangle ALS!

ALS Symposium 2008: New features for ALS patients

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… Continue reading ALS Symposium 2008: New features for ALS patients

Structuring and Presenting the Patients’ Perspective at AMIA

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… Continue reading Structuring and Presenting the Patients’ Perspective at AMIA

PatientsLikeMe Corporate Update: Q1 2008

This month marks the two-year anniversary of our flagship ALS community. It’s amazing to reflect on what we’ve achieved in just two short years. Not only did we build the world’s largest treatment and outcome sharing communities for ALS (1,800+ patients), MS (4,500+ patients) and Parkinson’s (1,300+ patients), but this year we began evolving into… Continue reading PatientsLikeMe Corporate Update: Q1 2008

It’s been two years!! ALS Community Report

PatientsLikeMe was born of a passion to provide the best tools for patients to participate in their own care, share experiences and change the way medical research is done.Thanks to our members and the dedication of our growing team, our first community, ALS, has now been open to the public for two years! The community… Continue reading It’s been two years!! ALS Community Report