A comprehensive guide to Motor Neuron Disease (MND), including its symptoms, causes, and survival rates, with analysis on the potential link between head trauma and the disease in contact sports like NRL.
Several other high-profile athletes have been diagnosed with the condition in recent years, including Australian rugby league player Carl Webb, who So, what is MND ?
And given the risk of head injuries in contact sports like NRL, is there an association between head trauma and the disease? MND is an umbrella term used to describe a class of diseases that affect nerve cells called motor neurons, whose job it is to carry messages from the brain to the muscles via the spinal cord.
While MND affects each person differently, in terms of initial symptoms, rate and pattern of progression and survival time, those affected experience muscle weakness and wasting as nerves become damaged and start to die. Around 800 Australians are diagnosed with MND each year, while the disease is responsible for roughly one in every 200 deaths annually.
The average survival time after diagnosis is two and a half years, but a minority will survive for more than 10 years. Liam O’Meara, MND NSW chief executive, whose father died from the disease, thinks there needs to be greater awareness about its devastating impacts.
“It’s important to note that whilst it may seem like a rare disease, it’s more of an uncommon disease,” he says. “It’s possibly the cruellest disease you can get. ”Ten per cent of motor neuron disease is caused by faulty genes, and that’s passed on from parent to child,” says Professor Dominic Rowe, a clinical neurologist and researcher at Macquarie University who specialises in neuro-degenerative diseases.
Sporadic motor neuron disease, which accounts for around 90 per cent of all MND cases, is thought to be triggered by environmental factors, says Rowe. These include chemicals pervasive in the environment like insecticides, pesticides, fungicides and herbicides.
“We think that this is co-location of population with agriculture and exposure to chemicals in an environment that damages special cells like motor neuron,” says Rowe. “But we’re very concerned about the exposure in agriculture and in some veterinary medicines too.
” Another suspected risk factor for MND is head injury, he says, which is relatively common in contact sports like rugby league, rugby union,from the Australian Institute of Sport’s Concussion and Brain Health, an incidence of 15.4 diagnosed concussions per 1000 hours of match play was reported during the 2019 NRL season. But concussion is also common in non-contact sports like marathon running and cycling.motor neuron disease, but what it does, we think, is disrupt the very special protective barrier called the blood-brain barrier that protects your brain from the agents in the environment that may damage such sensitive cells like motor neurons.
”found evidence that “repeated head injury with concussion, playing sports in general, and playing football in particular, are associated with an increased risk of MND. ” Its findings also suggested a link between emotional trauma resulting from physical abuse in childhood, and MND.
“That is probably the most devastating thing … is that we don’t have the answers. We don’t know why,” he says. MND is not a linear disease, and early signs depends on where the disease starts, explains Rowe.
“If the disease starts in the base of your brain, what’s called the brain stem, then patients often have slurred speech as their first symptom,” he says. “If it starts in their spinal cord, then that produces weakness in their hands or arms. ”O’Meara, describing the disease as “insidious”, says symptoms commonly start with the outer extremities, with something like tremors, but are highly dependent on the type of MND.
There is currently no known cure for motor neurone disease, and for those with sporadic MND, its most common iteration, “we don’t yet have a therapy that dramatically changes outcome,” says Rowe. MND is not a notifiable disease – meaning it does not need to be reported to government health authorities – something O’Meara says MND Australia is advocating for to change as it would improve data collection.
“That’s a step in the right direction because we’ll start getting the information we need to make better informed decisions,” he says. More robust data will not only help fund research – O’Meara says some estimates say we are 10 to 15 years from finding a cure – but also bolster funding for support for those already living with the disease, particularly in aged care.
“Until there is a cure, we really need a lot more funding to be on care and services right now. It’s a very costly disease. So there needs to be more focus on helping people with the disease right now. ”
Motor Neuron Disease MND NRL Player Carl Webb Head Trauma Risk Of Head Injuries Devastating Neurological Condition Environment Factors Contact Sports
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