on par with Einstein wrote:
From the article:
"Though 80 percent of those with ALS die within five years of diagnosis, and Hawking’s own doctors gave him roughly two years to live, he survived for decades, perhaps longer than any other patient with the disease in medical history."
Diagnosed at 21, lives until 76 with ALS. Incredible. The world has lost one of the great minds of the last century.
My father in law died of ALS at the age of 70 (about 2 years after his initial diagnosis, which is about average). That being said, people who are diagnosed younger tend to live far longer. It's an awful disease, as while the motor nerves degenerate, the mind remains sharp. One of the more interesting articles I have read on the subject looked at the link between cyanobacteria (AKA blue green algae) and ALS. It is based upon research done by a Mormon Ethnobotanist by the name of Paul Allen Cox. One of the more interesting things to come out of it is as algal blooms become more common due to global warming and fertilizer runoff, there is likely to be an increase in the incidence of ALS (at least the particular form of ALS that he was researching). The way they found to reverse the effect in the ethnic people of the Mariannas Islands (who had an extremely high incidence due to their diet of flying foxes who had high levels of cyanobacteria from cycad seeds they were eating that was grown in an area rich in blue green algae) was with L-Serene (an amino acid found in seaweed). Evidently people were ingesting a neurotoxin (BMAA) that was reprogramming their DNA. BMAA have since been found in shellfish and other sources.