View clinical trials related to Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis.
Filter by:The UAB Institute for Arts In Medicine (AIM) is currently implementing an expressive emotional writing pilot project for adults with paralysis caused by neurological conditions such as traumatic head or spinal cord injury.
The aim of this study is to create a repository of both cross-sectional and longitudinal data, including cognitive, linguistic, imaging and biofluid biological specimens, for neurodegenerative disease research and treatment.
Background/scope There is growing recognition that family caregiving is a serious public health issue requiring supportive interventions. Family caregivers play an essential role in sustaining a stable environment enabling individuals with motor neurone disease (MND) that are technology dependent to live at home. The family caregivers can experi¬ence exceptional burden and significant decline in psychological wellbeing due to MND's rapid and pro¬gressive nature with profoundly debilitating effects and intensive support needs. Dependence on assistive technology adds an additional level of complexity to family caregiving due to the need to learn how to operate and troubleshoot medical devices, train other caregivers, and negotiate appointments with new specialties within the healthcare system. Despite the recognized impact of caregiving for individuals with MND, data are scarce as to effective interventions that provide direct practical and psychosocial supports. Difficulty accessing support may increase psychological distress. As the burden of caring increases due to disease progression and increasing technology dependence, access to existing informal support networks may diminish. Online peer support using virtual modalities is a flexible and low cost form of support. Peers, people who have experienced the same health problem and have similar characteristics as support recipients, can be a key source of emotional, informational, and affirmational support. Peer support improves psychological well-being of caregivers of people with conditions such as dementia, cancer, and brain injury. Although peer support programmes for family caregivers of people with MND exist, data as to their efficacy are limited. Therefore, we have developed an online peer support programme, completed beta and usability testing and now propose to test the effect on caregiver psychological wellbeing and caregiver burden. Aim/research question(s) Overall aim: to determine the efficacy of a 12-week online peer support programme on family caregiver psychological health and caregiver burden. Primary research question: What is the effect of the online peer support programme on psychological distress measured using the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS)? Secondary research questions: 1. What is the effect on positive affect, caregiver burden, caregiving mastery, caregiving personal gain, and coping? 2. How do participants use the programme (fidelity and reach)? 3. What is the perceived usability and acceptability? Methods The investigators will conduct a parallel group randomised controlled trial with participants allocated to 12-week access to the online peer support programme or a usual care control group. The investigators will enrol family caregivers of an individual with MND who is referred for consideration or receiving any of the following 1. assisted ventilation 2. cough assist 3. gastroscopy and enteral feeding i.e., entering King's clinical staging Stage 4A: nutritional support; or Stage 4B: respiratory support [51]: The 12-week peer-to-peer support programme entails: 1. audio, video, or text private messaging; 2. synchronous weekly chat; 3. asynchronous discussion forum; and 4. informational resources. The investigators will collect demographic and caregiving data including the Caregiver Assistance Scale and Caregiving Impact Scale, and caregiver measures (HADS, Positive and Negative Affect Schedule, Zarit Burden Interview, Pearlin Mastery Scale, Personal Gain Scale, Brief COPE) at baseline and programme completion. The investigators will download use of online peer support programme features, assess usability, and conduct semi-structured interviews to explore acceptability using the Theoretical Framework of Acceptability. To test for a medium size effect (d=0.5), at 5% level of significance (2-sided) with power 80%, 64 participants are required in each arm (128 total). Adjusting for 20% attrition requires 154 participants. Proposed findings The proposed study will demonstrate the effect of a online peer support programme on psychological distress, positive affect, caregiving burden, mastery, personal gain and coping. Data on programme fidelity will enable the investigators to objectively assess acceptability and interpret study results. Data on usability and acceptability will inform future scalability of the online peer support programme outside of the trial both nationally and internationally, and to other family caregiver populations.
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a disabling and rapidly progressive neurodegenerative disorder. There is no treatment that significantly slows progression. Our project aims to find new biomarkers in MRI at three levels: cerebral, medullary and muscular. These markers could allow an earlier diagnosis of the disease by showing more specific lesions of ALS and to quantify these lesions to measure the progression of the disease. This study will use advanced Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) techniques High field (3T) and very high field (7T) MRI. Results from neurological and electrophysiological tests will be compared to the MRI. Subjects will be recruited from ALS center of Marseille, France. MRI will be done on ALS patients at baseline, at 3 month and at 6 month intervals.
Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, or Charcot's disease, is a neurodegenerative disease affecting motor neurons. The disease affects between 5 and 10 people per 100,000 in the world, nearly 7,000 patients are affected in France. The only therapeutic treatment available to date in France is riluzole, which slows the progression of the disease. Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis is the first degenerative disease affecting motor neurons. However, recent evidence suggests that the impairment extends beyond motor neurons alone. Optical Coherence Tomography analyzes made it possible to highlight ophthalmologic damage in patients with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, in particular at the macula and papilla, although some results are contradictory. No angiographic Optical Coherence Tomography analysis has been performed to date in patients with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. However, in the hypothesis of microvascular involvement participating in the pathophysiology of neurodegeneration in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, these examinations could provide relevant clinical and pathophysiological data by studying the retinal microvascularization of patients with the disease.
This is a phase 0 study that will enable an assessment of biodistribution and estimation of absorbed dose in humans based on data collected from five healthy volunteers, which is typically the minimum number required by the FDA for first-in-human studies to assess dosimetry of a new tracer. The evaluation of the brain imaging of thirty additional subjects in the 2nd part of the study will lead to a descriptive assessment of the targeting and pharmacokinetics of MPC6827 in the brain and between normal and diseased brain.
This study is a multi-center, open-label study of intravenous (IV) ANX005 in participants with ALS.
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a serious rapidly progressive disease of the nervous system. The average survival from the time of diagnosis is 3 years. Apart from Riluzole, there is no effective treatment. Care of advanced ALS will have a cost of 4-8 million NOK per year Research i.a. from the investigators department has shown that increased activity in histone deacetylation enzymes (sirtuins) together with increased access to NAD can delay disease progression. Nicotinamide riboside (NR) can increase cells' access to NAD and Pterostilben will stimulate sirtuins. The investigators want to study whether combination therapy with NR and Pterostilben can inhibit neurodegeneration in ALS and thereby delay disease development, increase survival and improve quality of life in ALS. In the study, the investigators will use 2 different dosages on the active treatment and strength calculations show that 180 patients are needed to show a rather weak effect. Patients will be recruited in collaboration with hospitals in Helse Vest, AHUS, Drammen, OUS and St. Olavs hospital.
In this proposed study, the investigators will evaluate the safety and efficacy of lipoic acid in treatment of Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The study will recruit 150 AD patients, and then these patients will be randomized to lipoic acid group or control group (75 patients per arm) for 6 courses for about 5 months. Clinical assessment will be done at screen/baseline, 3th course and 6th course. The specific aims are to compare lipoic acid versus control on: motor function and disease progression. During the study period, clinical effect index will be recorded, including bulbar function, motor function, respiratory function, and safety index including blood and urine routine, liver and kidney function, coagulation function.
This project adds to non-invasive BCIs for communication for adults with severe speech and physical impairments due to neurodegenerative diseases. Researchers will optimize & adapt BCI signal acquisition, signal processing, natural language processing, & clinical implementation. BCI-FIT relies on active inference and transfer learning to customize a completely adaptive intent estimation classifier to each user's multi-modality signals simultaneously. 3 specific aims are: 1. develop & evaluate methods for on-line & robust adaptation of multi-modal signal models to infer user intent; 2. develop & evaluate methods for efficient user intent inference through active querying, and 3. integrate partner & environment-supported language interaction & letter/word supplementation as input modality. The same 4 dependent variables are measured in each SA: typing speed, typing accuracy, information transfer rate (ITR), & user experience (UX) feedback. Four alternating-treatments single case experimental research designs will test hypotheses about optimizing user performance and technology performance for each aim.Tasks include copy-spelling with BCI-FIT to explore the effects of multi-modal access method configurations (SA1.3a), adaptive signal modeling (SA1.3b), & active querying (SA2.2), and story retell to examine the effects of language model enhancements. Five people with SSPI will be recruited for each study. Control participants will be recruited for experiments in SA2.2 and SA3.4. Study hypotheses are: (SA1.3a) A customized BCI-FIT configuration based on multi-modal input will improve typing accuracy on a copy-spelling task compared to the standard P300 matrix speller. (SA1.3b) Adaptive signal modeling will allow people with SSPI to typing accurately during a copy-spelling task with BCI-FIT without training a new model before each use. (SA2.2) Either of two methods of adaptive querying will improve BCI-FIT typing accuracy for users with mediocre AUC scores. (SA3.4) Language model enhancements, including a combination of partner and environmental input and word completion during typing, will improve typing performance with BCI-FIT, as measured by ITR during a story-retell task. Optimized recommendations for a multi-modal BCI for each end user will be established, based on an innovative combination of clinical expertise, user feedback, customized multi-modal sensor fusion, and reinforcement learning.