Anthony Geraci, director of the Neuromuscular Center at Northwell Health’s Neuroscience Institute on Long Island, said Hawking could just have had good genes. But not having ever examined him or taken a history, it’s a little hard for me to say.”ĭr. “I have patients in my clinic who were diagnosed in their teens and are still alive in their 40s, 50s or 60s. But it’s probably something similar to juvenile-onset disorder, which is something that progresses very, very, very slowly,” the doctor said. “Juvenile-onset is diagnosed in the teenage years, and I don’t know enough about his course to say. McCluskey said it’s possible that the visionary lived so long because he contracted ALS at a young age. Up to 10 percent of ALS patients live more than 10 years. Most people develop ALS - also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease after the famous Yankees player who died of it in 1941 - between the ages of 40 and 70 and live about two to five years after being diagnosed, according to the ALS Association. Leo McCluskey, an associate professor of neurology and a doctor at the ALS Center at the University of Pennsylvania, told Scientific American in 2012. “What’s happened to him is just astounding,” Dr. The British-born theoretical physicist defied the odds by living until the age of 76 - despite being given just two years to live when he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, in 1963, when he was 21 years old.
Stephen Hawking wasn’t just a scientific genius - he was a medical anomaly.
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