This fatal disease slowly shuts down every nerve and muscle in your body, progressively makes you disabled. This topic interested me by My Great Aunt being diagnosed with this. I started helping her with everyday things like cooking, cleaning, and making supper. Those things got harder and harder for her as everyday went by.
To diagnose this you can either go through a Muscle Biopsy, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), and Genetic Testing. All of these tests are fool proof but the Genetic testing you can only see in 10% of those tests. Treatments are currently not available but there are scientist working hard to achieve the cure. The doctors are starting to take neurotropic factors into consideration. Neurotropic factors are chemicals in the brain that help with the maintence, protection or neurons, and development. The cells begin to die off if those chemicals are not there. The research of the Neurotropic and pathological degeneration is very likely to find a treatment for ALS.
People who are first diagnosed who in feeling very tired and slow. Your muscles start to cramp. Joint pain can also occur when in certain positions. At Mayo Clinic, there are doctors who are trained to evaluate and test the patients that come in to the Mayo Clinic hospital. ALS is a difficult disease to diagnose early; the symptoms are similar to other disorders, such as spinal cord problems, and muscular sclerosis.
The ALS Association Research Program has gathered more than 67 million to help finding a cure. The most common cause of ALS is a genetic abnormality. Their genetic code was replicating wrong causing ALS. The genetic risk is usual non-inherited, but can be.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=JNZcC_3YLuo
The overall disease is horrible, and all others but this one I have witnessed my aunt slowly becoming paralyzed. The pain in this is terrible, the muscles you use every day someday become immobile and you can’t feed yourself, go to the bathroom, talk, etc. ALS effects 20,000 – 30,000 people in the Unites States. 1 in 2 cases are inherited.
- How would you deal with this disease if you had it?
- Why do you think people get this disease?
- ALS is a nerve damaging disease what would that effect?
I thought that this was a very interesting topic and disease. I found information on this disease from different sites which said that it can affect nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord. ALS sounds like a very terrible disease, and I honestly don’t know how I could live it. I found that ALS can be genetic or inherited from your family members. ALS would affect your muscles by making them weaker, lots of twitching in your muscles, impairment of use of arms and legs, thick speech, and shortness of breath. In my opinion this is a very serious disease and everyone needs to work hard to prevent. Also, there are scientists all over the world trying to find cures to Lou Gerhigs disease.
http://www.alsa.org/about-als/what-is-als.html