[JPLeRouzic]

I have some problem to understand why this is presented as a therapy (may be I do not understand what it implies) when the paper (or I may have found the wrong paper) states:

"Edaravone showed efficacy in a small subset of people with ALS who met criteria identified in post-hoc analysis of a previous phase 3 study, showing a significantly smaller decline of ALSFRS-R score compared with placebo. There is no indication that edaravone might be effective in a wider population of patients with ALS who do not meet the criteria"

Another paper is quite skeptical:

"Edaravone: a new treatment for ALS on the horizon? Orla Hardiman, , Leonard H van den Berg"

[caycep]

"therapy" means something you do to someone to try and change things. It may be a good therapy or crappy therapy, but it falls under the definition of therapy. Kind of like that Calvin Trillin line about a particular restaurant being debated as "good decor or bad decor but you can't say there's no decor..."

Overall, I'm always skeptical about treatments that focuses on "reducing oxidative damage"...because if you think about it, it doesn't really focus specifically on the disease itself. Oxidative damage happens to everyone daily, just by breathing air.

There's a bit of viewgraph engineering too, because the treatment group declined by 5-ish points, and the control group by 7 ish points out of a 48 point scale, they say "33% improvement"....

That being said, I suppose because it does something more than riluzole and doesn't kill anyone more than a typical chemo therapy, the company managed to get the FDA to Ok it...TBH, I probably should be more familiar w/ the criteria with which the FDA OKs or doesn't OK something