When you research the "possible causes" i think everyone would be susceptible! Most people have had amalgam fillings, most people are exposed to environmental toxins, most people are under extreme stress, and most people have illness's from different viruses.... And most people have all of these at once, like myself! There has to be a correlation between these occurrences AND something else that would make it more clear. Scientist's should do a study of people in the world that have ALS and what kinds of foods they ate and environment toxins and where they lived and where there ancestors came from. Maybe design a computer program that could find correlations, each country could enter all info about their ALS patient and it would go into a database that every country could share. I truly think it is like a cancer, certain cancers are going to show up in people that have had a similar gene pool or environment. Then when all those "triggers" come into play the (cancer) motor neuron starts to die, thus the beginning of ALS. My ancestors come from France, they then immigrated to Canada, then the U.S.A. I live in the south now, but grew up an hour away from Ottawa. It was a French Neurologist who discovered ALS, they call it Maladie De Charcot. Can you tell i really want to find out how this is caused so it can be cured!?