Cause of ALS is found, Northwestern team says
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Cause of ALS is found, Northwestern team says
1–10 of 24 posts
Re: Cause of ALS is found, Northwestern team says
#2As my dad died of familial ALS last year, thus this is fantastic news to me. And of all places, I learn this information from HN first. Thanks HN!
Re: Cause of ALS is found, Northwestern team says
#3If it turns out to be true, this guy deserves a Nobel Prize in medicine.
Re: Cause of ALS is found, Northwestern team says
#4Here's the journal article in Nature: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...
Re: Cause of ALS is found, Northwestern team says
#5My mother died of ALS; this is encouraging news. Of course it's not a treatment, yet, but given that nothing else so far has really been effective, it's a promising discovery.
Re: Cause of ALS is found, Northwestern team says
#6There's been lots of good news in medicine lately. Here's to a decade filled with great scientific advances.
Re: Cause of ALS is found, Northwestern team says
#7Never more proud to be a Northwestern alum. Go Cats!
Re: Cause of ALS is found, Northwestern team says
#8For those who come to the comments before the article, ALS means amyotrophic lateral sclerosisis or Lou Gehrig's disease, and "is a paralytic and usually fatal disorder caused by motor-neuron degeneration in the brain and spinal cord".
Re: Cause of ALS is found, Northwestern team says
#9My dad also died of ALS last year.
Identifying the cellular mechanisms underlying ALS is crucial. At the same time I'm disheartened by the conclusion of the researchers that this will pave the way to the development of drugs. Why is that always the first solution we turn to?
So ubiquilin2 is unable to repair damaged proteins in people with ALS. The question is, why?
I can't help but believe ALS is an autoimmune disease that is caused by the combination of genes and an environmental trigger. The fact that this possibility isn't even mentioned in the article suggests that we have a long way to go. Drugs, though helpful in some situations, are often merely band-aids. Let's find the trigger!
Still, this is progress. My dad donated his body to Northwestern for research so I can't help but be proud today.
Re: Cause of ALS is found, Northwestern team says
#10This is a link to the full text: http://extremelongevity.net/wp-content/uploads/als_discovery...
I'm hesitant to put too much hope in this discovery. I would expect a discovery of this magnitude to be published as a full article in Nature, rather than a Nature Letter. I'm not sure of the difference in the publishing process for the two, but Letters generally come across a bit rushed and are less exhaustive than published articles (citation needed).