Why did lou gehrig die

The first baseman hit. He took the field for 2, games in his career with 2, coming in one unbroken streak; he also retired with a. That reality became all too apparent in The prolific first baseman lacked his signature power at the plate.

He also battled constant fatigue and began to lose coordination. He played eight regular-season games before removing himself from the lineup. In his game slowed, as did his coordination, and during the season he benched himself, ending a 2, game streak.

It explained his debilitating skills, but the diagnosis did not come with a treatment. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth. I have been in ballparks for seventeen years and have never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans. He tried a variety of treatments, including taking large quantities of vitamin E by injection and by mouth.

Studies have looked at whether vitamin E can prevent the disease but more research is still needed. And because he had been public about his diagnosis, the world also watched—and hoped—as he sought an answer. Gehrig actually said them. Two months earlier, on May 1, , Gehrig gallantly took himself out of the lineup because he could no longer will his body to perform the athletic miracles that made him, arguably, the best baseball player ever to play the game.

He was a member of six World Series Championship teams , , , , , and during his year career, he knocked out homers and 2, hits, batted in 1, runs, and achieved a lifetime batting average of.

Gehrig began experiencing his first neurological symptoms in , right around the time of his 35th birthday. Desperate to find out the cause of his problems, he and his wife visited the famed Mayo Clinic, from June 13 to June 19, Harold Habein, certified his diagnosis of the poorly understood, rare and typically fatal ALS.

Yet medical ethics and practice of this era often emboldened physicians to tell a patient partial truth about a lethal malady or, paternalistically, not to tell the patient at all, and, instead, only inform close relatives. Nevertheless, recovery was a belief Gehrig hung onto for the remaining two years of his life.

In retirement, he took on an active role as a member of the New York City Parole Commission, but by spring , he had lost too much strength to fulfill those duties. He died on June 3, , just 16 days shy of 37 years of age. Approximately 30, people living in the United States have the incurable and progressive ALS, most of them are men between the ages of 40 and 70 years.

Many die within a few years of being diagnosed; others, such as the famed physicist Stephen Hawking, can live for years with their brains fully functioning even though their bodies and muscles have degenerated and wasted. Maybe not, say a group of neurologists, physicians and pathologists at the Boston University School of Medicine Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy.

These doctors are presently conducting landmark research on the brains of deceased former NFL players. In other words, repetitive head trauma, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy CTE may result in a syndrome that mimics ALS. Journal of Neuropathology and Experimental Neurology.