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Excessive exercise increases the risk of developing degenerative disease

After years of suspicion, researchers have finally been able to prove that high-intensity exercise causes some people to develop the deadly degenerative disease.

Athletes are sometimes six times more likely to get it

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• als

• Exercise

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Thursday, 17 June 2021, 07:10 Updated: 09:21

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Routine strenuous exercise can lead to the development of severe and terminal degenerative disease - ALS. Researchers have come to this interesting and disturbing conclusion in a new study.

ALS (acronym for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) is the most common type of motor neurone disease - a group of degenerative diseases that affect the brain and nervous system. It is an irreversible, progressive and deadly disease, and although significant progress has been made in the treatment of patients in recent years, it is still incurable. It is also a very unexpected disease, with no "standard" course of progress and so far, even without known unambiguous factors.

Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking's name is probably most associated today with ALS, and his case is also a good illustration of the unexpected nature of the disease - Hawking lived 5 decades longer than his diagnosis predicted.

But before Hawking there was another celebrity who fell ill with it - the legendary New York baseball player Yankees Lou Grigg, who died at the age of 37 and one of the nicknames of the disease is named after him ('Lou Grigg's disease', a nickname best known in the US).

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To the full article

An unexpected course of illness.

Scientist Stephen Hawking contracted ALS (Photo: AP)

But Grigg is by no means the only professional athlete who has contracted ALS - according to studies, professional soccer players are six times more likely to get the disease, compared to the risk of the general population. Competition in school sports has also been linked in past studies to an increased risk of developing ALS. So far, however, this relationship has been merely a correlation, with no proven causality. And that is as stated what has changed now, with the publication of the new study.

"We suspected that exercise was a risk factor for ALS, but so far this hypothesis has been considered controversial," Dr. Jonathan Cooper-Knock, one of the authors of the new study, explained in an online interview with IFLScience. "Exercise reduces the risk of dying from other diseases (cardiovascular), which indirectly actually increases the risk of dying from motor neurone disease," he said.

Exercise reduces the chances of dying from other diseases, but indirectly increases the risk of ALS. Woman doing surges (Photo: ShutterStock)

The new study has two significant benefits. First, the researchers applied a research method called mandala randomness. Unlike the use of traditional population samples, this research method measures the prevalence of certain conditions or traits with the help of measurable genetic changes. This means that there are fewer distractions and research deviations caused as a result of distracting variables, which are filtered out in this research technique. In the present study, the researchers examined the genetic prevalence of ALS in stratification with an early tendency to engage in sports or exercise.

The second benefit is that the researchers enjoyed access to the UK Biobank database - a huge database that contains lifestyle information and has helped research many areas in the past. The study, published in the journal EBioMedicine, explains how lifestyle factors such as smoking, education and body fat percentage (previously claimed to have an effect on ALS risk) were ruled out. And underneath it was actually a routine and strenuous exercise that was found to be the main culprit in causing the risk of the disease.

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"Exercise creates problematic toxicity"

"Exercise is not a single homogeneous exposure to the risk of getting sick," the researchers clarify in an article they published.

"Different types of exercise may affect different biological pathways as well as subtypes of motor neurons ... Accordingly, our study did not find that low-intensity or infrequent exercise has an effect on the risk of getting sick, but only high-intensity activity. Regularly, but also in leisure time - and it is this that creates problematic toxicity, "they wrote.

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To thoroughly examine their research assumption the researchers examined more than 300 genes known to be affected by strenuous exercise.

They found that more than twenty percent of them were at high risk for ALS and some were found in laboratory conditions as a direct cause of motor neuronal cell death.

While these are very compelling findings, the researchers explain that it does not mean that the gym subscription should be canceled yet.

"We have established the claim that strenuous exercise has a causal link to ALS, but we still do not know who those people are who are at increased risk of developing ALS as a result of high-intensity activity. It is clear that exercise is a positive and beneficial factor for most people's health, so we No one is advised to stop exercising, at this point, "Dr. Cooper-Knock clarified." Most people who exercise frequently will not start ALS ... Our future goal is to be able to specifically advise those people who are at increased risk and target "They are adapted to exercise habits that will allow them to make informed decisions about their health."

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