Gene/Protein Disease Symptom Drug Enzyme Compound
Pivot Concepts:   Target Concepts:
Query: UMLS:C0002736 (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis)
 19,048 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

In the Western Hemisphere, prior to 1950, there were few reliable data on the incidence, geographic distribution or population patterns of diseases of the nervous system. Impressions of prevalence were generally derived from the European literature and from a variety of case reports and relative frequencies based on clinic or hospital admissions or selected autopsy series. Since such data from different sources generally defy comparison, it has been necessary to develop data sources for defined populations to provide incidence and prevalence rates. Such an effort, initially concerned with multiple sclerosis, was launched in 1950 by NIH. International mortality statistics were also collected and analyzed and intensive population surveys in the United States and Canada were planned and carried out. In time, such efforts were extended to cover a wide variety of other chronic and subacute diseases of the nervous system, and support was provided by NIH and voluntary agencies for studies in many other countries. Independently, population studies were developed at various Universities and health care facilities in Latin America. ISSSTE in Mexico City provided a broad experience on multiple sclerosis, ALS, epilepsy, stroke and brain tumor; studies developed in the West Indies on Jamaican Neuropathy; and there were studies in several countries on cysticercosis, Chagas' disease and epilepsy. Also notable are recent studies in Guatemala and plans for geographic comparisons over the broad range of latitude in Chile. The advantages and limitations of mortality statistics will be discussed. The priorities in the selection of the disorders which were to be studied, the procedures which were developed, and the highlights of the results of such investigations will be presented. In addition to descriptive population surveys, case control comparisons and prospective studies are also being developed which seek to identify the risk factors or etiologic determinants that may account for the population pattern which have been observed.
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PMID:25 years of neuroepidemiology in the Americas. 35 5

Two newly identified foci of usually rare disease occurring in high incidence in isolated primitive populations of West New Guinea are discussed as examples of medical problems that demand immediate intensive investigation because the unique naturally occurring experiments they represent are soon likely to be altered. These are: (1) amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Parkinsonism, and dementia syndromes in a small population of Auyu and Jakai peoples in the Lowlands, and (2) an epidemic of burns from cysticercosis epilepsy from newly introduced Taenia solium in pigs in the Ekari people of the Wissel Lakes in the Highlands. A third new example is a focus of male pseudohermaphroditism among the Simbari Anga in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. These are presented along with a series of eleven further examples of the kind of problems that require urgent opportunistic observation because of the extreme changes that investigation and therapeutic and preventive efforts themselves, as well as the inevitable effects of acculturation, will evoke from the moment an investigator or other outsider from a technologically advanced culture enters the previously isolated community.
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PMID:Urgent opportunistic observations: the study of changing, transient and disappearing phenomena of medical interest in disrupted primitive human communities. 41 3

A case is described in which the clinical and pathological features of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) occurred in a patient with cysticercosis of the central nervous system and associated pachymeningitis of the cervical spinal cord. This is an extremely rare finding. The patient also presented the two symptom complexes more commonly encountered in this condition: focal and generalized epilepsy, and signs of obstructive hydrocephalus. The literature relevant to this case, and to cysticercosis in Great Britain, is briefly reviewed. The case described adds to the concept of motor neurone disease as a syndrome rather than a disease entity of undetermined aetiology.
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PMID:Cysticercosis of the central nervous system with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis: case report and review of the literature. 502 14