Local Expert Continues ALS-Soccer Link Probe

Michele Gillen
Reporting

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(CBS4) MIAMI Is the most popular sport in the world taking a terrible medical toll on Italian soccer players?

It’s a question that has been investigated by a South Florida doctor for years and now he’s taking another important step forward in trying to answer it and figure out why it’s happening.

Between 1960 and 1996, 40 players died from Lou Gehrig’s disease, a number so high that an Italian magistrate launched an investigation four years ago into the medical mystery, and the Italian ALS community looked to the University of Miami School of Medicine for help.

Internationally renowned Miami neurologist Dr. Walter Bradley headed up an unprecedented summit looking at the possible link between Lou Gehrig’s disease and playing soccer.

Lou Gehrig's disease, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, is a devastating condition in which the nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord that control the body's voluntary muscles are attacked and killed. The muscles atrophy, and people eventually lose the ability to move their arms, legs, and body or to breathe on their own. The disease does not affect the intellect, so during the three to five years most people live with ALS, they are painfully aware that they are withering away.

In May of 2003 ,CBS4’S Michele Gillen reported on the ALS summit and the Italian magistrate’s claims that he had evidence that the incidence of deaths from Lou Gehrig’s disease among Italian soccer players is about nine times the expected incidence seen in the general population. Gillen traveled across Europe to investigate the findings and interview players afflicted with the disease.

Now, Dr. Walter Bradley is on the cusp of making headlines around the world again as he goes on an unprecedented medical mission to try and unravel what causes the debilitating and deadly disease.

Dr. Bradley recently told Gillen he is going to Japan, China, Dubai, Cutter and Italy, in response to the CBS4 investigation of emerging evidence that Italian soccer players, like beloved former star Adriano Lombardy, were being struck down and dying of ALS at 8 times the normal rate.

Dr. Bradley told Gillen that the hypothesis is now fact.

“We now know that it is 15 times the occurrence if they played for more than 5 years.”

Now the question is why is it happening?

To that end, he and a team of doctors are off searching for samples of a potential microscopic killer that they suspect may be hiding in the dirt and grass of soccer fields and sands of playgrounds. It’s called cynobacteria and they are investigating whether it produces a toxin that for some might trigger motor neuron disease.

“We are going to go off into the dessert and break off the crust of it and take samples of it and talk with neurologists to see if they see any weird neurological diseases more than they should see, things like ALS and alchemies disease. We will bring back specimens, contacts, and hopefully we will develop out of that yet further abilities to do the things that are needed. We are actually in Turin where we are going to visit the neurologist who did the study in the Italian soccer players and we are going to scrape the grass on the pitches and we are trying to see if we can culture cynobacteria from there, it is another link in the chain. It turns out there are blooms of these algae or cynobacteria that occur on pools, that green sheen on the top of standing water, that’s cynobacteria. If you go into the dessert there is a crust of what seems like a dried sand, its got cynobacteria,” according to Dr. Bradley.

Bradley is most interested in a chemical secreted by the bacteria called BMAA.

“We have looked at the brain of patients who died with ALS and compared them with the brains of people who died of other things. And we find BMAA in the ALS brains, but we don’t find them in the control brains and that is another very important linkage."

And guess where else this BMAA has turned up?

"We similarly confirmed it is in Alzheimer’s brains, so the chain is coming together," said Bradley.

Some of the sites of his global tour were chosen because of a seemingly abnormal incidence of Lou Gehrig’s Disease.
According to Bradley, "In Japan, we are going to the key peninsula. The key peninsula is another area where at one time there was something like 100 times of ALS as in the rest of the world."

Bradley's quest for answers is triggered by the human loss.

It ultimately returned him to the soccer fields of Italy where he met the man who in ways started it all, Adriano Lombardy, and asked Michele Gillen to have Miami doctors study him with the hope of helping others.

And while Lombardy wasn’t expected to live more than a few months past their visit, Dr. Bradley and Michele called him just days ago. He was too ill to speak but they let him know his wish was already impacting the world. His struggle and courage touched many lives and perhaps it might even save some lives.

"It is a miserable disease. It really is a very hard disease. If we could ever find what causes it, the wonderful thing about it, the theory is that, if it is right, we can design treatments that ought to be able to prevent it or be able to protect those who are sensitive and at risk of getting it and maybe could give treatment to those who have got it." That's just a wonderful, wonderful thought," said Bradley.

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