Assessment of long-term outcome in neurological disease

Excerpt

Many neurological diseases are chronic in nature impacting on patients over many years and have a variable outcome. For some of the rarer diseases, this means that it can be problematic to provide a clear picture of disease evolution of disease over time. However, the understanding of the natural history of neurological diseases remains important for a number of reasons. Specifically, data from these studies is able to inform discussions with affected patients both at diagnosis and as the disease progresses, and allows neurologists to give more accurate information about the disease in question and the nature of the patient experience as a result of the disease. In addition, they may be used to guide treatment decisions, assess therapeutic efficacy of intervention and allow statistically robust clinical trials to be designed which are adequately powered both in duration and patient numbers to detect treatment response. …