ALS is a neurodegenerative disease that quickly kills motor neuron functioning in the body. In most cases, patients afflicted with the disease die within five years. Although a specific cause has not been identified, however, multiple factors have been attributed to the onset of this disease. This may sound insensitive, but why do we care about the disease? Only 3.9 out of every 100,000 Americans are affected, which is only 0.0039%. Even in the targeted age group (70-79), only 0.017% suffer from the disease. Compare these statistics with cancer. In American citizen has a 39.6% chance of getting cancer in their lifetime. There are many other first world diseases with higher prevalence than ALS as well. So again, why do we care about this disease?
ALS has recently gained a lot of publicity through the Ice Bucket Challenge frenzy that occurred last year. This event helped to spread the word about the disease, it also raised about 100 million dollars for research of the disease. My question is; were people really concerned about finding a cure for ALS, or just participating in the newest social media craze? Before this fundraising, ALS did not receive significant amounts of donations for research. In fact, the only reason this disease received as much attention as it did was likely because it ended a very famous baseball player’s career (Lou Gehrig). Personally, I don’t think the disease needs more attention or increased funding. Not only because it is extremely uncommon, but also because it affects mostly the elderly. There are a limited number of resources in the research world; these resources being researchers and funding. I believe more research and funding needs to go towards diseases with a higher prevalence among the whole population. Once more prevalent diseases are cured, more attention can be given to more obscure diseases. Also, research on the common diseases like cancer may even provide knowledge necessary to find a cure to related, but less prevalent diseases. An applicable analogy of this idea relates to homework. If I have homework due in all four of my classes one night, what is the best way to complete it all? I’ll probably start with either the most difficult class or whichever homework is due the soonest. Once I complete that assignment, I go onto the next most important assignment and so on, until all my work is done. This method is much more effective than attempting to work on all the assignments at the same time. You may even learn something from the early assignments that help you complete the latter ones.
With that being said, research should still be conducted on ALS. However, with limited resources the research needs to be specifically directed. There are too many potential physiological causes to narrow down with the limited amount of funding researchers have. I think research should be directed towards gene therapy; this could have a high potential of limiting the prevalence of familial ALS. There are a few known proteins that cause some of the symptoms of ALS, errors in the SOD-1 protein in particular, that could potentially be corrected for with directed funds and research. All in all, ALS should remain one of the lower priority diseases because of its low prevalence and primarily affected age group.
ALS… Why Do We Care?
ALS primarily affects people between the ages of 40 and 70. Two arguments can be made for spending more money on neurodegenerative diseases such as ALS. One they have such a devastating toil on the person with the disease as well as their loved ones. Two there are in most cases no effective treatments. The amount of money dedicated to the study of various diseases needs to be expanded, but just as important understanding the cause of these diseases needs to be better understood so that research can focus on addressing the cause (such perhaps as inhibiting NMDA receptor activation).