In the medical world of diseases, there are some disorders that have remained baffling even to our renowned doctors and scientists. The exact causes of how they have developed remain a mystery. One of these uncommon disorders is Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS).
ALS is a disease that affects our neurological system, eventually destroying nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord and causing muscular control loss. The early symptoms would include loss of control in the arms and legs, twitching, slurred speech, clumsiness, uncontrolled emotional outbursts, muscle weakness and fatigue. When it progresses later, symptoms include paralysis, difficulty in swallowing, and shortness of breath.
While most of us believe that most diseases will never impact us since we attempt to live a healthy lifestyle and eat well, it is important to have some knowledge and understand these diseases and who has been afflicted by them.
Here are 8 famous people affected by ALS:
1) Lou Gehrig (American baseball player)
ALS is also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Why? Because it was so named after the great baseball player diagnosed with this. He was the first well-known celebrity to get ALS. Thus, his name is now so closely associated with the disease.
Popular in the 1920s and 1930s, Lou Gehrig was an American baseball player who had multiple Major League records. He was known as “The Iron Horse” to his many fans and supporters. He signed for a $1,500 bonus with the Yankees in 1923 and became a full-fledged Yankee in 1925, allowing him to play for the following 13 years. However, on his 36th birthday on June 19, 1939, he was diagnosed with ALS by doctors at the Mayo Clinic, thus ending his career in baseball. He succumbed to ALS complications two years later.
2) Stephen Hawking (cosmologist / theoretical physicist/author)
Another famous person who has been diagnosed with ALS is Stephen Hawking. This famed scientist was only in his early 20s while in his third year at Oxford when he found himself falling frequently and appearing to be clumsy most of the time. Even though he was confined to a wheelchair for most of his life, he got to live until he was 76. For the most part, he kept contributing to the scientific world by using technology to effectively communicate his theories and great ideas.
The 2014 film “The Theory of Everything” details his life story.
3) David Niven (actor)
An Academy Award-winning actor starring in movies like “A Matter of Life and Death”, “Around the World in Eighty Days”, and “The Pink Panther”. One of the first actors to return to the army, he enlisted when Great Britain declared war on Germany in 1939. After that, he returned to Hollywood to continue his acting career until he was diagnosed with ALS in 1981. He passed away due to ALS two years later at age 73.
4) Jon Stone (writer/director/producer)
Thanks to Jon Stone, Sesame Street, the most popular and well-loved children’s show, was born. He was an Emmy Award-winning writer, director, and producer, with Cookie Monster and Big Bird as two of his most well-known creations. He was also one of the three original producers and one of the writers. He penned the hit show’s pilot screenplay and remained a director until 1996. He died at age 65.
5) Mao Zedong (Chinese communist leader)
He was a Chinese communist leader who oversaw the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, both of which were terrible policies. He was born on December 23, 1893, and later trained to be a teacher after which he moved to Beijing to work in the University Library. He began reading and studying Marxist literature during this time. In Hunan, he created the Marxist Communist Party, and the People’s Republic of China was founded by him in October 1949.
Later, his health deteriorated, and he had lung and heart ailments. His ALS diagnosis was kept secret from the public. He was 82 when he finally died of a heart attack in September 1976.
6) Ezzard Charles (boxer)
Nicknamed the “Cincinnati Cobra”, he became a world champion and boxed in three categories: heavyweight, light heavyweight, and middleweight. He was diagnosed with ALS in 1968 and later became severely disabled. At age 53, he succumbed to the illness. It was 1975 and just seven years after he was initially diagnosed.
7) Dwight Clark (football player)
He played for the San Francisco 49ers and was part of two teams that went on to win the Super Bowl. Unfortunately, he began to feel weakness in his left hand and was later diagnosed with ALS in 2015. As is quite typical of ALS, where most patients die within three to five years after diagnosis, he died of the disease just three years later in 2018.
8) Steve Gleason (football player)
Another professional football player that has been diagnosed with ALS is Steve Gleason. Although now confined to a wheelchair, he continues to campaign for patients to have access to affordable speech-generating devices. He has become a champion for research and increasing awareness about ALS and shows the world that this difficult health problem won’t stop him from trying to find help for people just like him.
It is quite a tragedy that ALS has afflicted some of the great minds and athletes of our time, but we must not lose hope that people in the medical field continue to do their best to find cures for mysterious diseases, no matter how impossible it may seem. ALS clinical trials are still being conducted, and we hope that major breakthroughs will be found soon enough.