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Previous Volume 342:523-524 February 17, 2000 Number 7 Next

	Since this article has no abstract, we have provided an extract of the first 100 words of the full text and any section headings.

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By Andrew Eisen and Charles Krieger. 303 pp. New York, Cambridge University Press, 1998. $74.95. ISBN 0-521-58103-6.

Neurodegenerative diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis have always been a challenge to neurologists and to the scientific community in general. These idiopathic diseases target a particular neural system (the motor system, in the case of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) and cause progressive neuronal death with no clear inflammatory or metabolic basis. Neurodegenerative diseases tend to occur both sporadically and, less frequently, in a pattern of autosomal dominant inheritance: 10 percent of cases of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis are familial.

Investigators previously considered neurodegenerative diseases to be abiotrophies, which are processes caused by accelerated aging. This concept led to a certain pessimism . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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