Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), also known as Motor Neurone Disease and Lou Gehrig’s Disease is a progressive degenerative condition where a person’s motor neurons lose their ability to transmit messages from the brain. Motor neurons are the nerve cells that we use to tell our muscles to move – they control our voluntary movements. When we lose our motor neurons we lose our ability to move our limbs, swallow, speak.
ALS is most well known as the condition that Stephen Hawking the acclaimed astronomer/physicist, Lou Gehrig the baseball player and “Killing me softly” singer Roberta Flack lived with and eventually died from.
This June, brush up on your knowledge of ALS with MNB’s medical research collection. Find out what Motor Neurone Disease is, how to spot the early signs and can’t up with some recent developments in the search for better treatments.
