Diseases Affecting the Immune System

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Diseases Affecting the Immune System Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, is a disease of the nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord that control voluntary muscle movement. The cause of ALS is unknown and also referred to as Lou Gehrig’s disease. The progressive degeneration of the motor neurons in ALS eventually leading to their death. When the motor neurons die, the ability of the brain to initiate and control muscle movement is lost. With voluntary muscle action progressively affected. Patients in the later stages of the disease may become totally paralyzed. Having shown that there is local and systemic alteration in the immune system in ALS, it is necessary to determine if this primary or secondary, and whether it is harmful or beneficial. The immune and inflammatory changes in ALS could be primary and part of the cause of the disease. Alternatively neuroinflammation and T cell infiltration could also be secondary to the tissue damage that occurs in ALS, as it is in other nervous system injury. Once established, inflammation and immune changes could exacerbate damage or be protective. The protective aspects of inflammation include clearance of debris by microglia which is important in repair and interaction with T cells. Brain-specific T cells at the site of injury can play a role in the repair of damaged or inflamed tissues — this has been termed “protective immunity”. This is likely to be due to the effects of cytokines and growth factors delivered by T cells to the site of injury. Such protective immunity was appears to be a general phenomenon, that is homeostatic. (P.A. McCombe, 2009)1 According to population studies of the United States, a little over 5,600 people in the U.S. are diagnosed with ALS every year. Almost as many as 30,000 American have the disease at any given time. Based on the ALS CARE Database, 60% of the people diagnosed

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