Lou Gehrig's Disease or Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) is a neurological disorder characterized by progressive degeneration of motor neuron cells in the spinal cord and brain, which ultimately results in paralysis and death. The disease takes its less-scientific name from Lou Gehrig, a baseball player with the New York Yankees in the late 1920s and 1930s, who was forced to retire in 1939 as a result of the loss of motor control caused by the disease.
In 1991, a team of researchers linked familial ALS to chromosome 21. Two years later, the SOD1 gene was identified as being associated with many cases of familial ALS. The enzyme coded for by SOD1 carries out a very important function in cells: it removes dangerous superoxide radicals by converting them into non-harmful substances. Defects in the action of this enzyme mean that the superoxide radicals attack cells from the inside, causing their death. Several different mutations in this enzyme all result in ALS, making the exact molecular cause of the disease difficult to ascertain.
Recent research has suggested that treatment with drugs called antioxidants may benefit ALS patients. However, since the molecular genetics of the disease are still unclear, a significant amount of research is still required to design other promising treatments for ALS.
The ALS Therapy Development Institute (ALS TDI), together with its wholly-owned subsidiary, Anelixis Therapeutics, announced today that it has formed a research partnership with Neurimmune to advance potential treatments for ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease.
University of Utah and German biologists discovered how nerve cells recycle tiny bubbles or "vesicles" that send chemical nerve signals from one cell to the next. The process is much faster and different than two previously proposed mechanisms for recycling the bubbles.
RNA molecules, used by cells to make proteins, are generally thought to be "silent" when stowed in cytoplasmic granules. But a protein mutated in some ALS patients forms granules that permit translation of stored RNAs, according to a study in The Journal of Cell Biology. The finding identifies a new mechanism that could contribute to the pathology of the disease.
In the beginning, Chris Hempel noticed the clumsiness. Her girls tripped over toys on the floor. Their grandfather said he couldn't teach them to pedal their tricycles. … The Hempels learned of people who called themselves citizen-scientists. Many shared research papers and their day-to-day experience. Some talked of their willingness to try any promising drug. Others sought a role as equal partners with researchers. Scientists, while sympathetic, generally believe their work should be left to experts. Families are encouraged to raise money if they want to help, but the traditional view is that amateurs can't shape research or find cures. The Hempels found a maddening gap between the search for scientific knowledge and the search for treatments (Amy Docker Marcus, 11/2013).
For decades, scientists have searched for treatments for myopathies - genetic muscular diseases such as muscular dystrophy and ALS, also called Lou Gehrig's disease.
Developing psychiatric medications is a long and complex process. Candidate drugs are evaluated and assessed based on their effects on the behavior of animals, usually rats or mice. Each class of drugs, from antidepressants to antipsychotics, is tested differently - often in a labor-intensive process that leaves plenty of room for human error. And there is a growing consensus that current procedures fail to effectively produce new medications.
Complete Care, a collaborative approach to meeting patient needs, is improving outcomes for Kaiser Permanente patients.
New research by scientists at UC San Francisco shows that one of the brain's fundamental self-protection mechanisms depends on coordinated, finely calibrated teamwork among neurons and non-neural cells knows as glial cells, which until fairly recently were thought to be mere support cells for neurons.
Two patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) have received stem cell injections to their spinal cords at the University of Michigan Health System - the first two to receive the experimental injections in Michigan as part of a national clinical trial.
Working with cells in test tubes and in mice, researchers at Johns Hopkins have discovered that a chemical commonly used as a dog food preservative may prevent the kind of painful nerve damage found in the hands and feet of four out of five cancer patients taking the chemotherapy drug Taxol.
University of Adelaide researchers have identified a likely molecular pathway that causes a group of untreatable neurodegenerative diseases, including Huntington's disease and Lou Gehrig's disease.
Studies of a therapy designed to treat amyotrophic lateral sclerosis suggest that the treatment dramatically slows onset and progression of the deadly disease, one of the most common neuromuscular disorders in the world.
Researchers have tied mutations in a gene that causes amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and other neurodegenerative disorders to the toxic buildup of certain proteins and related molecules in cells, including neurons. The research, published recently in the scientific journal Cell, offers a new approach for developing treatments against these devastating diseases.
Researchers in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania found that, across a variety of neurodegenerative diseases, cerebrovascular disease affecting circulation of blood in the brain was significantly associated with dementia.
Scientists using sophisticated imaging techniques have observed a molecular protein folding process that may help medical researchers understand and treat diseases such as Alzheimer's, Lou Gehrig's and cancer.
Americans are used to hearing that health care will bust the budget. The Congressional Budget Office projected last year that Medicare, Medicaid and other government health programs would eat up 9.6 percent to 10.4 percent of the nation's gross domestic product by 2037, crowding out many other vital programs. But a new report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development suggests that the United States is not the only country that will struggle to contain public spending on medical care (Eduardo Porter, 6/27).
The motor neuron disease Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease, progresses in a stepwise, sequential pattern which can be classified into four distinct stages, report pathologists with the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in the Annals of Neurology.
A new study conducted by a team of Indiana University neuroscientists demonstrates that GLT1, a protein that clears glutamate from the brain, plays a critical role in the craving for cocaine that develops after only several days of cocaine use.
Transplantation of human stem cells in an experiment conducted at the University of Wisconsin-Madison improved survival and muscle function in rats used to model ALS, a nerve disease that destroys nerve control of muscles, causing death by respiratory failure.
Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have identified mutations in several new genes that might be associated with the development of spontaneously occurring cases of the neurodegenerative disease known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.
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