Ludolph A C, Meyer T, Riepe M W
Department of Neurology, University of Ulm, Federal Republic of Germany.
J Neural Transm Suppl. 1999;55:79-95. doi: 10.1007/978-3-7091-6369-6_8.
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a fatal neurodegenerative disease which was thought to be untreatable for a long time. However, recent evidence in men indicates that antiglutamatergic strategies are the first to have an influence on its pathogenesis and slow down the disease process. Since the effect of the drugs is still small, this progress cannot only be seen as a success of the present but most also be acknowledged as a starting point for the future. How will these future studies look like? They will have to take into account that ALS presumably has a long preclinical period and they will use a number of novel compounds and treatment strategies which have recently been shown to be effective in a transgenic animal model. This also implies that we are likely to use combination therapies and have to try to treat patients early. The latter will be necessarily connected with the demand for a novel clinical attitude to the diagnosis of the disease.
肌萎缩侧索硬化症（ALS）是一种致命的神经退行性疾病，长期以来被认为无法治疗。然而，最近在男性中的证据表明，抗谷氨酸能策略首先对其发病机制产生影响，并减缓疾病进程。由于药物的效果仍然很小，这一进展不仅可以被视为当前的成功，而且也必须被视为未来的起点。未来的这些研究将是什么样的呢？它们将不得不考虑到ALS可能有很长的临床前期，并且将使用一些最近在转基因动物模型中已显示有效的新型化合物和治疗策略。这也意味着我们可能会使用联合疗法，并且必须尝试尽早治疗患者。后者必然与对该疾病诊断的新型临床态度的需求相关。
