U of T researcher tackles ALS
by JENNIFER WELLS
There comes a chilling moment, staring as we are at a microscopic cross section of a human spinal cord, when Janice Robertson steps away from her telescope and offers a layperson an up-close image of what she has just been studying. The revealed picture is nothing so much as a sea of faint brown, absent any clear shapes within it. A wash of discolouration, as if the slide were an error, a lab technician's mistake.
How can it be that a layperson's eye sees nothing here?
The untutored observer has, in fact, seen everything there is to see. "Basically, there's nothing left," says Robertson of the cross-section. "The neurons have gone and there's no sign that they ever existed."
The neurons have gone. As Dr. Robertson says this, it is as if all the air has been swept right out of the room. As if one cannot breathe.
She speaks of neuronal death, of the demise of the body's information messengers. As the neurons die, the body's motor structures fail to respond to the brain's impulses. The muscles start to atrophy, resulting in progressive, relentless paralysis. To the moment when the patient is trapped, cognitively intact, in a frozen form. To the ultimate moment when the patient dies.
The cruel progression under discussion is amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. We know it as Lou Gehrig's disease, and most of us still retain the powerful memory of a defiant Sue Rodriguez and her fight for the right to die. It's a fair bet that few are aware that at the University of Toronto, a research effort focused exclusively on ALS is just finding its bearings.
There are those in this universe whose passions are more focused than others. Janice Robertson — Edinburgh-born; PhD University of London — is one such traveller. A student for whom an interest in neuroscience became a more focused interest in neuro-degeneration, which in turn led to Alzheimer's research before branching into ALS, an area occupied by relatively few scientists.
At the University of Toronto's Centre for Research in Neurodegenerative Disease, Robertson, 41, has established an ALS lab, which is now finding its place alongside the centre's renowned work in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Brand new lab equipment has arrived. The call has gone out for research assistants. As you would expect, funding is an issue.
The sky today is a sunny blue. And Robertson herself, in her jeans, her lavender shirt, her hair streaked and Blundstones on her feet, is a bright, shining presence despite the grim statistics she goes on to parse. The incidence of ALS in Canada currently runs at about 2 per 100,000. To place that among the unseemly calculus in which the incidence of one disease is weighed against another, ALS shows similar numbers to multiple sclerosis.
But there the statistical comparison ends. At any one time the number of MS sufferers is approximately 50,000. Those who suffer from ALS: 2,000 to 3,000. The reasons for the discrepancy: MS generally affects sufferers at a much younger age. And the progression of ALS is horrendously fast: 90 per cent of patients die within three to five years of diagnosis.
Comparisons are odious and Robertson steps gingerly around this point. "No disease is worse than the other. They're horrible. They're all horrible ... Thinking about trying to raise awareness for this disease, it's like trying to trade one disease off against another, which isn't fair," she says. "I just feel, you know, when you consider the numbers, the incidence is the same. I feel they're forgotten. Do you know what I mean?"
She picks up a recent copy of, of all things, People magazine. A story within it explores the cruel irony of neurologist Richard Olney, founder of the University of California (San Francisco) ALS Center. In the summer of 2003, the story recounts, Olney began having some difficulties walking. He blamed a herniated disc. Cont'd...
by JENNIFER WELLS
There comes a chilling moment, staring as we are at a microscopic cross section of a human spinal cord, when Janice Robertson steps away from her telescope and offers a layperson an up-close image of what she has just been studying. The revealed picture is nothing so much as a sea of faint brown, absent any clear shapes within it. A wash of discolouration, as if the slide were an error, a lab technician's mistake.
How can it be that a layperson's eye sees nothing here?
The untutored observer has, in fact, seen everything there is to see. "Basically, there's nothing left," says Robertson of the cross-section. "The neurons have gone and there's no sign that they ever existed."
The neurons have gone. As Dr. Robertson says this, it is as if all the air has been swept right out of the room. As if one cannot breathe.
She speaks of neuronal death, of the demise of the body's information messengers. As the neurons die, the body's motor structures fail to respond to the brain's impulses. The muscles start to atrophy, resulting in progressive, relentless paralysis. To the moment when the patient is trapped, cognitively intact, in a frozen form. To the ultimate moment when the patient dies.
The cruel progression under discussion is amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. We know it as Lou Gehrig's disease, and most of us still retain the powerful memory of a defiant Sue Rodriguez and her fight for the right to die. It's a fair bet that few are aware that at the University of Toronto, a research effort focused exclusively on ALS is just finding its bearings.
There are those in this universe whose passions are more focused than others. Janice Robertson — Edinburgh-born; PhD University of London — is one such traveller. A student for whom an interest in neuroscience became a more focused interest in neuro-degeneration, which in turn led to Alzheimer's research before branching into ALS, an area occupied by relatively few scientists.
At the University of Toronto's Centre for Research in Neurodegenerative Disease, Robertson, 41, has established an ALS lab, which is now finding its place alongside the centre's renowned work in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Brand new lab equipment has arrived. The call has gone out for research assistants. As you would expect, funding is an issue.
The sky today is a sunny blue. And Robertson herself, in her jeans, her lavender shirt, her hair streaked and Blundstones on her feet, is a bright, shining presence despite the grim statistics she goes on to parse. The incidence of ALS in Canada currently runs at about 2 per 100,000. To place that among the unseemly calculus in which the incidence of one disease is weighed against another, ALS shows similar numbers to multiple sclerosis.
But there the statistical comparison ends. At any one time the number of MS sufferers is approximately 50,000. Those who suffer from ALS: 2,000 to 3,000. The reasons for the discrepancy: MS generally affects sufferers at a much younger age. And the progression of ALS is horrendously fast: 90 per cent of patients die within three to five years of diagnosis.
Comparisons are odious and Robertson steps gingerly around this point. "No disease is worse than the other. They're horrible. They're all horrible ... Thinking about trying to raise awareness for this disease, it's like trying to trade one disease off against another, which isn't fair," she says. "I just feel, you know, when you consider the numbers, the incidence is the same. I feel they're forgotten. Do you know what I mean?"
She picks up a recent copy of, of all things, People magazine. A story within it explores the cruel irony of neurologist Richard Olney, founder of the University of California (San Francisco) ALS Center. In the summer of 2003, the story recounts, Olney began having some difficulties walking. He blamed a herniated disc. Cont'd...
