SCIENTIFIC HUB

Follow the evidence.

SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE · MED

Identifying patterns in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis progression from sparse longitudinal data.

Nat Comput Sci · 2022-09-08

DOI: 10.1038/s43588-022-00299-wPMID: 38177466

Open accessresearch-article; Journal Article; Research Support, N.I.H., ExtramuralOriginal source ↗

Research overview

The text below is the source article’s original abstract under a verified reuse license. cc by

The clinical presentation of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a fatal neurodegenerative disease, varies widely across patients, making it challenging to determine if potential therapeutics slow progression. We sought to determine whether there were common patterns of disease progression that could aid in the design and analysis of clinical trials. We developed an approach based on a mixture of Gaussian processes to identify clusters of patients sharing similar disease progression patterns, modeling their average trajectories and the variability in each cluster. We show that ALS progression is frequently nonlinear, with periods of stable disease preceded or followed by rapid decline. We also show that our approach can be extended to Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases. Our results advance the characterization of disease progression of ALS and provide a flexible modeling approach that can be applied to other progressive diseases.

Scientific assessment

01

Research question

Assess the question within the original study’s scope.

02

Methods & sample

Check the source article for study design and sample details.

03

Key findings

An editorially approved findings summary is not yet published for this record.

04

Limitations

Generalizability, bias and clinical meaning require separate assessment.

Methods, samples and clinical conclusions are not inferred from bibliographic metadata.