Alejandro Caravaca Puchades

I’m a neurologist and data scientist working at the intersection of clinical neurology and quantitative research, generating real-world evidence (RWE) on amyotrophic lateral sclerosis from disease registries and routine-care real-world data (RWD). My work spans epidemiology, biostatistics, and disease modelling — longitudinal analysis of disease progression, survival analysis, and the methodological discipline needed to draw regulatory-grade conclusions from messy observational data. I use R and Python to build reproducible analyses answering clinically relevant questions.

You can browse my publications, recent talks, the software I maintain, and occasional writing on ALS, data science, and statistics.

Recent

The ALSFRS-R: what it measures, why we use it, and where it fails

Essay

11 May 2026·2564 words·13 mins·#als #clinical-trials #outcome-measures #alsfrs-r

A structured tour of the ALSFRS-R: its twelve items across four functional domains, why feasibility and sensitivity to change made it the field’s standard outcome measure for twenty-five years, and a frank account of the psychometric limitations that have accumulated against it.

3rd Meeting of the Spanish ALS Research Network

Talk

7 May 2026·#als #national-als-registry #real-world-evidence

An update on the data collected in the Spanish ALS Registry and the analyses under way, presented at the 3rd Meeting of the Spanish ALS Research Network (Zaragoza): descriptive characterisation and cohort-wide figures, cognitive assessments (ECAS), effectiveness of riluzole, real-world data on tofersen, and differences between autonomous communities.

What are we actually measuring?

Essay

5 May 2026·1356 words·7 mins·#als #clinical-trials #outcome-measures #alsfrs-r

Clinical trials in ALS live or die by their outcome measures. This opening piece of the series frames the measurement problem in neurodegeneration — biological versus functional endpoints — and sets up why the ALSFRS-R became the field’s default answer to it.

ENCALS Meeting 2025

Talk

4 June 2025·#als #cognition #phenotypes #irish-als-register

A plenary-session oral communication at the ENCALS Meeting 2025 (Turin) on the cognitive profile of restricted ALS phenotypes — progressive bulbar palsy, flail arm and flail leg syndromes — using the National ALS Register of Ireland: why these slow-progressing forms are worth studying, a data-driven way to define “restricted” disease from the clinical record, what distinguishes these patients, and ECAS analyses pointing to comparatively stable cognition over time.