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Lou Gehrig's Disease

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Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord. ALS is also named Lou Gehrig’s disease because he was the first person to bring ALS to a national attention in the 1930’s. Lou Gehrig’s amazing professional baseball career was ended short by this horrific disease. There are multiple treatments for ALS, but no cure for this fatal disease. In 2014, ALS was brought to major attention by the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. Although Lou has the disease named after him, there are several other notable individuals who have been diagnosed with ALS. These individuals include Stephen Hawking, Jim Hunter, Steve Gleason, George Yardley …show more content…

Lou Gehrig was born in New York City in the year 1903. Lou was born into poverty, his dad could not keep a job and could not stay sober while his mother worked hard but could not make enough to support Gehrig and his three siblings. The Gehrig family took advantage of Lou’s excellent athletic ability in baseball and football and sent him to college. At Columbia University Lou played fullback for the football team and pitcher for the baseball team while studying engineering. Although Gehrig was pitching, the New York Yankees liked the way he swung the bat so they offered him his first professional league contract. Gehrig had a much decorated major league career in the MLB. He set the record for most consecutive games played, 2,130, which is about 13 years of games. He set multiple batting records that include most Runs Batted In in a season, most home runs in one game, and winning the Triple Crown Award (Having the most home runs, RBIs, and batting average in the MLB). Lou also won six World Series titles in his baseball career with the Yankees. In 1938 Lou noticed that he was not playing baseball as well as he should be. At this time he also noticed that he was having trouble tying his shoes and other simple tasks so he scheduled a doctor’s appointment. In 1939 Lou was officially diagnosed with ALS, ending his …show more content…

Professors of neurology do not even know why Stephen has been able to live this long with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Professor Leo McCluskey has some ideas of why Stephen Hawking has lived past the normal person with ALS. One idea is that Hawking is just astounding and an outlier. McClustley’s other idea is that Hawking has the juvenile-onset type of disease. This means that the disorder progresses very slowly. He says this because in most patients who were diagnosed in their teens live into their 40’s, 50’s, or 60’s. Even though Hawking has been confined to a wheelchair ever since he was 21 years of age, he has still been able to bring ideas about black holes and quantum gravity to the public eye. For the past 30 years Hawking has been able to speak through with his trademark computer system. He operates his computer system through his cheek and is able to communicate very well. Having amyotrophic lateral sclerosis did not slow Hawking down. He spent 30 years as a professor of mathematics at the University of Cambridge, and he is currently the director of research at Cambridge’s Center for Theoretical Cosmology. Hawking was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in 1963, but he has been able to make a family of his wife and three children. His children were born after his diagnosis in 1963; he had kids

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