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Experts discuss ALS research

By Lindsay Eichhorn
Contributor
Nov 25 2006

Seeking a cure for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis will likely come from the jungle, says to Dr. Andrew Eisen, former director of the neuromuscular disease unit at Vancouver General Hospital and the ALS Centre.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease, is a neuromuscular disease that rapidly attacks the motor neurons in the body. These neurons transmit messages from the brain to specific muscles in the body. When the muscles do not receive these messages, they lose strength and die.

According to Eisen, a cure for the disease lies among other cures.

“The answer to ALS is unlikely to come from ALS. It’s probably going to come from the fruit fly or what happens to zebras in the jungle,” says Eisen who spoke at a provincial ALS research conference at Richmond’s Quilchena Golf and Country last week.

He’s not joking.

“That’s why it’s terribly important that people working in ALS communicate with a wide variety of scientists and other physicians.”

Although Riluzole has recently been approved as a treatment for ALS patients, there is no cure for the disease. Scientists and experts in ALS, Alzheimer and Parkinson’s diseases have been researching to determine a cure for ALS for decades.

“The important concept is that they are closely related. What makes them different is the clinical manifestations because they each hit different nerve cells in the nervous system,” says Eisen.

ALS affects roughly 5,000 Canadians.

In 90 per cent of cases, the disease is diagnosed in patients with no family history of ALS, leading researchers to believe that ALS can strike anyone.

The onset of ALS can be very subtle causing physicians to overlook the most frequent symptoms.

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From Page A18

According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, early symptoms may include twitching, cramping, or stiffness of muscles; muscle weakness affecting an arm or a leg; slurred speech; or difficulty swallowing.

“Muscle function (loss) isn’t just the weakness of arms and legs. It’s the (lack of] ability to talk, to to breathe, and to stand, and to move your neck around,” says Eisen.

Eisen stresses the importance of increasing the patient’s quality of life by tackling the issues that the patient is suffering such as immobility, breathing and mental and spiritual attitude.

“Quality of life, or decreased quality of life, is what the patient says it is, not what you think it is. So you have to ask them how they feel about it,” he says.

But ALS does not only weaken the patient’s muscle strength. Along with suffering the symptoms of the disease, each patient struggles to deal with the progression of disabilities and possibility of death. This places extreme mental and spiritual pressures on both the patient as well as the family and caregivers.

Although there’s no specific cure, Eisen says, “I like to think we are living in a window of opportunity that we had before. And there’s a lot of exciting research happening all over the world.”

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