Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis

What’s the term Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis?

Its specialty is neurology. In other name it is called as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is actually a unique disorder that involves the death of neurons. Motor neurone disease (MND) is other name usually called by United Kingdom. But neurons are actually group of five conditions of which ALS is the most common. Main factors of ALS are stiffness in muscles, twitching of muscles and mostly worse pain full weakness.
This entire phenomenon results in pain as well as difficulty in speaking swallowing and breathing too. It becomes unknown in about 90%-95% of cases. Total 55 – 10% of people get affected by their parents. It depends much on genes or genetic disorder. It results in death of neurons that takes control on voluntary muscles. The diagnosis is taken by seeing according to person’s signs and symptoms with testing done find out other potential causes and effects. Can ALS be cured? Actually no there is no cure of ALS. Then what can be done? A special meditation named Riluzole may be extending life of expectation of up to two to three months. This disease is usually caused to person of around 60 ages and also may be in inherited cases around the age of 50.

Signs and Symptoms of Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis

  1. Muscle weakness and atrophy all through the body which happens due to the degeneration of the upper and lower motor neurons.
  2. Lose control on their movements or ability to initiate.
  3. Cognitive function is generally spared for most people of about 5% which can also develop frontotemporal dementia.
  4. Cognitive changes also have more subtle in higher proportion of people of about (30-50%) which becomes unnoticed.
Autonomic nervous system and sensory nerves are mostly unaffected means to say that the majority of people with ALS maintain hearing, sight, touch, smell, and taste. the start of ALS may be subtle that the symptom are overlooked.75% of people facing ALS firstly experience the weakness or atrophy in an arm or leg and this is also known as ‘limb-onset’ ALS. It usually varies from person to person but sometimes most people are eventually not able to even walk or use their hands and arms. They also sometimes loosed the ability to speak or swallow food. Most people die due to failure of respiratory within three to five years from the onset of symptoms.

Preventions:

Do you want to know the preventive measure for this disease? Here’s it. Difficulty in chewing and swallowing of food becomes great problem in patients which makes eating very difficult and increases the risk and danger of choking or of aspirating food onto lungs. The most common ALS causing mutation is a mutant SOD1 gene which is seen in North America. The studies also took a look on glutamate which is present in motor neuron degeneration. It is one of the neurotransmitters in the brain .

No comments: