If you are active on social media, or watch the news, you may be familiar with a fundraiser known as The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. The challenge involves dumping a bucket of ice water over your head to promote awareness for ALS. The other part of the challenge involves nominating another to complete the challenge and encourages the participants to donate money to ALS if they don’t complete the challenge in 24 hours. According to the ALS Association, the ice bucket challenge raised 115 million dollars in a six week period from August to mid-September of 2014. The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge was such a success, that the Association made it an annual event, and will continue the tradition until a cure is found.
Despite the large sum of money raised and the obvious increase in awareness for the disease, there are many who still may not know what ALS is. ALS, also known as Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis or Lou Gehrig’s Disease, is a neurodegenerative disease that affects neurons in the central nervous system. Motor neurons flow from the brain, through the spinal cord and out to the muscles of the body. In patients with ALS, motor neurons progressively lose their ability to function, eliminating the brains capacity to control muscle movement. As the disease progresses, the affected muscles waste away as they lose their ability to contract. The disease eventually takes away the ability to walk, write, speak, breathe and eat, and in the latter stages of the disease patients can become completely paralyzed. Due to the debilitating nature of the disease, the typical lifespan of someone with the disease is 2-5 years, averaging 3 years. Around 1 in 50,000 people will be diagnosed with ALS, and in the U.S. alone, around 6,400 people are diagnosed every year.1
Some of the leading thoughts on the causes of ALS are glutamate toxicity and protein aggregates. Glutamate is an excitatory neurotransmitter, and when it binds to its receptor it causes an influx of calcium into the neuron (too much calcium can cause the cell to die). Another cause that is being explored, is protein aggregates. Protein aggregates consist of misfolded proteins that accumulate within the cell eventually leading to cell death.2 Both disrupt the cells ability to function normally and are believed to contribute to the death of motor neurons in patients with ALS.
I hope you were able to learn something new about ALS, so next time you are nominated for the Ice Bucket Challenge you can share some of what you learned to help raise awareness for the disease.
- ALS Association website http://www.alsa.org/about-als/what-is-als.html
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.bbadis.2012.11.013
