Doctors still trying to strike out Gehrig's disease

September 6, 1995

[Lou Gehrig] From Medical Correspondent Dan Rutz

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- Lou Gehrig's baseball record may have been toppled Tuesday, but the disease bearing his name unfortunately lives on.

Doctors call the disease that cut short Gehrig's career Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, or ALS. Most know it simply as Lou Gehrig's Disease, a crippling condition in which nerve cells in charge of movement gradually weaken and die.

Over the three- to five-year course of the disease, the stricken typically lose control of their bodies, but not their minds.

[Leroy Maxwell] "The muscles in there just started deteriorating a little bit at a time. You just became weaker and weaker and weaker. It went from the left leg into the right leg," said Leroy Maxwell, who has ALS.

Gehrig's sport was baseball. For Maxwell it was basketball that brought him pleasure as well as the first signs that something was wrong. "For about six months we kept going back and forth and arguing with the doctor that I thought it was a sprung ankle," he says.

The disease that killed Gehrig more than 50 years ago still holds the lead over medical science. There is no cure for ALS. But that sad record may at last begin to yield.

Most of the encouraging news comes from the laboratory, where researchers have found ways to slow or prevent the destruction of nerve cell colonies. At Atlanta's Emory University, Dr. Jeffrey Rosenfeld works with antioxidants, a family of compounds that shows promise.

[Dr. Jeffery Rosenfeld] "If you could administer an antioxident protein, which are proteins normally found in all cells, perhaps you could protect the cell from cell death or injury," Rosenfeld said.

But Rosenfeld admits to a frustrating trend of promising laboratory studies translating poorly to the bedside.

"Currently, it means buying people a few more months," Rosenfeld said. "That obviously is not the goal. The goal is to arrest the development of the disease. We have much more remarkable results in the laboratory now. We can promote cell survival far longer than we can promote the survival of cells in the patient. We need to understand that better," he said.

Meanwhile, Maxwell and others with ALS hold onto hope for a cure. "The doctors, as far as them being able to help, all they can just about do is make sure that you have the right equipment around that's going to be comfortable enough for you," he said. (99k .aiff sound file)

There wasn't much in the way of experimental trials in Lou Gehrig's day. Today's patients face the same life threat he did, but with a measure of hope that comes from a determined scientific effort to unravel the mysteries of ALS.

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