A retired engineer, Frank Andrews of Katy, Texas, has never been the type of guy to just sit back and let life pass him by. Always wanting to give scuba diving a try, Andrews, 46, made his first dive 15 years ago. He quickly discovered that exploring the underwater world was in his blood, and he started diving with a group of friends from church.

Clinic team member

Multidisciplinary clinic teams at MDA/ALS Centers often include social workers as part of their vital services.

Sheilah Blansit, a licensed clinical social worker (L.C.S.W.) at the MDA/ALS Center at Texas Neurology in Dallas, works with local MDA ALS Health Care Services Coordinator Carolyn Minnerly to get newly diagnosed individuals into the center’s ALS clinic quickly to address immediate concerns.

New York author Philip Carlo first started showing the symptoms that eventually would be diagnosed as ALS in February 2005.

“I was coming back from doing an interview of Richard the Ice Man at Trenton [N.J.] State Prison,” recalls the 58-year-old Carlo, who has published five books of true and fictional crime and has a sixth one (on the Mafia) under way.

“I was in Penn Station, and my left foot was flopping on the marble floor. I was in excellent physical condition, and I thought I had some problem attributable to running too much.”

Darlene Bates of Lee’s Summit, Mo., has a thing for checkers. Not the board game, but the black-and-white painted squares that mark the beginning and end of a stock car race.

Bates, who received a diagnosis of ALS in November 2001, is a NASCAR fan who watches the races on television every weekend, rooting for her favorite driver, Jimmie Johnson, 2006 NASCAR Nextel Cup Champion and driver of the Lowe’s-sponsored No. 48 Chevrolet. (Lowe’s also is an MDA national sponsor.)

ALS-statin interactions probed

A report this summer from the World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Centre for International Drug Monitoring caused a stir by suggesting that widely prescribed cholesterol-lowering drugs might raise the risk of developing ALS.

March 21, 2007. I’m sitting in an adaptive bi-ski at the top of Crawford’s Blaze run, at the Bretton Woods Mountain Resort in New Hampshire. Across the valley I have a beautiful view of the Presidential Range of the White Mountains. What’s a girl from Nashville, Tenn., who’s almost completely paralyzed from ALS, breathes with a ventilator and has never skied before in her life, doing here? It’s a long story ...

Think ahead

TDP-43 protein's absence may mean SOD1 ALS is different

ALS that stems from mutations in the SOD1 gene may be biochemically different from ALS from other causes, suggests a report published in the May issue of Annals of Neurology.

Ian Mackenzie at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and colleagues, say the presence of a protein called TDP-43 in the nervous system appears to distinguish non-SOD1 ALS from SOD1 ALS.

A study in the May 29 issue of Neurology is the third to find that a viral protein known as reverse transcriptase is more frequently found in the blood of people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) than in those who don't have the disease.

Reverse transcriptase is an enzyme that retroviruses (a viral family that includes HIV) use to replicate themselves.

The hallmark of ALS is the degeneration of two kinds of motor neurons — upper, which are in the brain, and lower, which are in the anterior horn (front section) of the spinal cord and in the brainstem. These two sets of motor neurons work together to drive movement and locomotion, but have separate, important functions as well.

‘Toxic neighbors’ likely kill nerve cells, at least in SOD1-caused ALS

Nervous system support cells known as astrocytes and nervous system immune cells called microglia appear to play a role in whether motor neurons in the spinal cord live or die, at least in one form of genetic ALS. Motor neurons (nerve cells that control muscle activity) degenerate in all forms of ALS.