Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS)

As the number of troops exposed to improvised explosive devices in Iraq and Afghanistan has mounted, so, too, has concern about the long-term impact of these and other blasts on the neurological health of service members. These worries are amplified by recent evidence that head injuries sustained by football players and other athletes can cause personality changes, dementia, and neurodegeneration later in life. A study reported this week in Science Translational Medicine ties these troublesome threads together: In autopsies of four military veterans who served in recent conflicts, researchers have found distinctive features of the same neurodegenerative disease reported previously in athletes.

By Julie Steenhuysen CHICAGO (Reuters) - Using just her thoughts, a 58-year-old paralyzed woman instructed a robotic arm to grasp a cup of coffee and guide it to her mouth where she sipped from a straw, the first drink she has been able to serve herself in 15 years. The woman is one of two patients in the ongoing trial of BrainGate neural interface, an experimental brain-computer interface technology that may one day give paralyzed individuals more mobility. '

As April Wine once sagely noted, rock ’n’ roll is a vicious game. Sometimes, however, it’s got nothing on life, this proven by Jason Becker: Not Dead Yet.

Straddling the line between profoundly sad and powerfully inspirational, director Jesse Vile’s doc focuses on Jason Becker, a former guitar prodigy from the working-class section of Richmond, California. At age 14 he’d mastered the back catalogues of both Van Halen and Eric Clapton, and, that not being enough, also figured out how to play Mozart’s greatest hits speed-metal style.

Pete Frates wants people to know that, all things considered, he feels pretty good. Eight weeks removed from being formally diagnosed with ALS, he's attacking the disease with the same contagious, positive energy that made him a leader on the baseball field at St. John's Prep and Boston College.

Recent studies suggest that there are other disorders brought on by concussion-like trauma that can erode the central nervous system in similar ways as ALS.

What happens when you’re faced with a life-threatening illness but you can’t get into a clinical trial or wait for lengthy drug development to run its course?

Some patients take matters into their own hands.

But ALS Worldwide — a nonprofit that was set up by Stephen and Barbara Byer, the parents of Ben Byer, who died of ALS in 2008 — are trying a different strategy.

Stephen says he’d been interested in a compound called dexpramipexole for years as a potential treatment for ALS. When he learned in 2010 that Biogen Idec was going to launch a late-stage clinical trial of the compound to try for FDA approval, he contacted the company and asked if it would help ALS Worldwide set up a so-called compassionate-use trial. (Sometimes companies agree to make a drug available to a small number of patients who don’t qualify for a formal clinical trial but still want to use the drug under a doctor’s supervision and FDA oversight.)

A new Northwestern Medicine® brain-machine technology delivers messages from the brain directly to the muscles – bypassing the spinal cord – to enable voluntary and complex movement of a paralyzed hand. The device could eventually be tested on, and perhaps aid, paralyzed patients.

“We are eavesdropping on the natural electrical signals from the brain that tell the arm and hand how to move, and sending those signals directly to the muscles,” said Lee E. Miller, PhD, Edgar C. Stuntz Distinguished Professor in Neuroscience at the Feinberg School of Medicine, professor of biomedical engineering (by courtesy) at the McCormick School of Engineering, and the lead investigator of the study, which was published in Nature. “This connection from brain to muscles might someday be used to help patients paralyzed due to spinal cord injury perform activities of daily living and achieve greater independence.”

The research was done in monkeys, whose electrical brain and muscle signals were recorded by implanted electrodes when they grasped a ball, lifted it, and released it into a small tube. Those recordings allowed the researchers to develop an algorithm or “decoder” that enabled them to process the brain signals and predict the patterns of muscle activity when the monkeys wanted to move the ball.