Here’s a vexing question raised by a study released this week: Did Lou Gehrig really have Lou Gehrig’s Disease?
The research essentially links brain injuries — concussions and brain trauma — to a disease than can be mistaken for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which is commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease.
The report by the Journal of Neuropatholgy and Experimental Neurology got widespread press coverage Wednesday, including a lengthy Page One story, “Study Says Brain Trauma Can Mimic ALS,” in The New York Times and an article in The Wall Street Journal.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/18/sports/18gehrig.html?src=me&ref=general
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704554104575435850832715586.html?mod=WSJ_WSJ_US_News_5
According to The Times, physicians at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Massachusetts and the Boston University School of Medicine doing autopsies on athletes found that two football players and a boxer who’d been diagnosed with ALS didn’t actually have it.
Exams on the three men’s brains and spinal cords determined that they had a fatal malady similar to ALS, “caused by concussionlike trauma, that erodes the central nervous system in similar ways,” The Times reported.
New York Yankee Lou Gehrig solidified his standing as a sports legend when he declared himself “the luckiest man on the face of the earth,” even though he’d been diagnosed with the fatal disease that would come to have his name. ALS causes a person to lose muscle control, and for their muscle tissue to atrophy.
Gehrig sustained many concussions over the years, according to The Times, and he insisted on playing when he had them. That could have cumulatively added to the initial brain damage casued by his concussion, and resulted in the condition that ended his life.
The study released this week could, and I think it should, lead to more careful diagnosis of both athletes and soldiers who suffer head trauma. As The Times points out, athletes and the military could be more effectively treated if they were diagnosed correctly, let’s say as suffering from a motor-neuron disease rather than ALS.
The new study offers firm some evidence that brain injury causes motor-neuron degeneration, and that this can lead to a disease that is not ALS. Rather, the disorder that resulted is marked by two proteins, tau and TDP-43, in the spinal cord that negatively affect nerve function.