Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis and Autoimmunity

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis has become one of the prime targets of modern neurologic research. With Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease, it is one of the so-called degenerative diseases of the aging nervous system. "Degenerative" means there is no vascular disease, no inflammation, no histologic clue to causation. The cells just shrivel and disappear. The three disorders have other links: they each affect a particular set of neurons (but not the same set); they are inexorably progressive; and they may occur together in the same family or, rarely, in the same person. Moreover, the many clinical variations imply that each of . . .