[Intro]
Sometimes the internet can make us do stupid things, like stay up until three in the morning
watching videos of kittens stuck inside hamster balls.
Or make us think that swallowing a tablespoon of cinnamon is suddenly a good idea.
It isn't; don't do it.
But by now you've heard about the ice bucket challenge, and it's proving to be a rare instance
of the internet spurring people to do something that's actually worthwhile.
The challenge itself, as I'm sure you know, is just a way to publicly pledge support for
research into a disease known as ALS, and get others to do the same.
Which raises the question of what ALS is and how we think we can beat it.
Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis is the most common type of motor neuron disease--a condition
of the nervous system that targets the motor neurons, those nerve cells in your brain,
brain stem, and spinal cord that communicate directly with your muscles to make all of
your voluntary movements possible.
ALS causes these neurons to degrade, making them unable to send signals to the muscle
fibers that make movement possible.
It begins very subtly, sometimes with symptoms like being unable to speak clearly, or having
trouble chewing, or experiencing what feel like muscle cramps.
But as the disease progresses, more neurons degrade and more muscles stop receiving stimuli,
which causes them to weaken and atrophy or lose muscle tissue.
Ultimately, in the later stages in the disease, patients can become paralyzed, and the neuron
degeneration can move onto those nerve calls that affect involuntary actions, namely breathing.
Most patients die within two to five years of diagnosis.
ALS is one of the few diseases that can be legitimately described as mysterious because
even though 140,000 people in the world are diagnosed with some sort of motor neuron disease
each year--that's 384 new cases a day--we still don't have a clear idea about what causes
them.
Between five and ten percent of ALS cases seem to have genetic origins, for example.
Researchers in the past few years have identified dozens of genetic mutations that show up in
some ALS patients, like defects that corrupt the enzymes that help protect our cells from
toxins.
But it's not clear how most of these mutations specifically affect motor neurons, and other
cases seem to suggest that environmental factors can also play a role.
According to the US National Institutes of Health, for instance, military personnel who
served in the Persian Gulf region during the 1991 war were more likely to develop ALS than
those who didn't serve there.
So it may turn out that ALS is more like a syndrome that has many different causes, and
perhaps the genetic clues that we're seeing simply put those people at greater risk.
We're just at the very beginning of understanding ALS, and since we don't have a handle on what
causes it, there's also no cure.
There is one drug available in the US that seems to slow the progression of the disease
in some patients, but most of the other treatments are focused on simply alleviating the symptoms
that come from losing muscle control and improving the quality of life for patients as much as
possible.
Now, there are a lot of diseases that are worth taking an icy bath to help fight, and
this is definitely one of them.
Caitlin: Aaahhh, hahaha!
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