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Lou Gehrig's Disease Research Paper

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Lou Gehrig, one of the greats in baseball, had his amazing record taken from him during the 1939 season when he gave the umpire the cards of the players and announced he would no longer play the game. The reason for this was Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis disease or ALS. This disease later became known as Lou Gehrig's Disease. ALS was first discovered by French Neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot in 1869. Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis affects the brain and spinal cord nerve cells. “A-myo-trophic means no muscle nourishment” (ALS association: What Is ALS?).
This disease affects the nerve cells by enabling them to send electric impulses to the muscles which ultimately makes the muscle wither away and stop working. The nerves targeted are actually …show more content…

The two different forms are Sporadic and Familial. The Sporadic ALS makes up approximately 90 to 95 percent of the people who have this disease in the US. The other 5 to 10 percent cases of ALS in the US are made up by Familial ALS. When someone is diagnosed with Familial ALS it means that they inherited it.
ALS is usually diagnosed in people between 40 to 70 years old, and more common among caucasians. “For unknown reasons, military veterans are twice as likely to be diagnosed with the disease than the general public”(ALS association: What Is ALS?). Although, even with this statistic on it, anybody can get ALS. Symptoms for ALS are so generic that they are overlooked most of the time.
Some of the symptoms include slurred and nasal speech, difficulty chewing or swallowing, cramping, stiff or tight muscles, or muscle weakness (NINDS:Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Fact sheet). The reason that the symptoms are so common to other diseases, causes many people to overlook the possibility of ALS. It’s not until more obvious weaknesses are present that physicians begin to suspect ALS. This basically causes people to be blindsided by the diagnose of this disease and at times it has been reported that people fall into

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