Ride For Life: Pesticides implicated in soccer players with ALS

(ANSA) - Turin, June 10 - Pesticides have been implicated as a cause of a fatal nerve-wasting illness with an alarmingly high rate among soccer players.

Until now, doping and painkillers have been suspected as causes of Lou Gehrig's Disease.

A Turin University neurologist, Adriano Chio', presented a report on Friday noting that farmers were the other group with a higher-than-usual rate of the disease.

Chio' pointed out that soccer pitches were treated with commercial weedkillers.

He noted that some of the pesticides use chemicals also present in anti-inflammatory drugs.

"This leads me to suspect there may be a combination of factors at the root of the high incidence in the soccer world," Chio' said at a workshop on the disease.

Soccer players are six and a half times more likely to get the disease than the rest of the population, according to a Turin University survey.

Italy's top anti-doping prosecutor Raffaele Guariniello is investigating the high number of former footballers who have died of, or contracted, Gehrig's Disease.

This year three fatal cases of the illness have been reported to Guariniello, raising the toll to 33. Five
ex-players are still living with the condition.

The Turin University team monitored the health of 7,325 professionals who played in Italy's top two divisions, Serie A and Serie B, between 1970 and 2001.

It uncovered five cases of Gehrig's Disease - whose scientific name is Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) - in that group. The average incidence for a sample of that size
of the general population is only 0.77 cases.

The research suggested that midfielders and older players are more prone to the illness.

It also found that Gehrig's Disease strikes earlier in footballers than it does in the general population.

The average age at which the disease appears in the general population is 63, but that comes down to 43 in soccer players.

Experts have long suspected that footballers were made vulnerable to the disease by prolonged use of
anti-inflammatory or performance-enhancing drugs at doses higher than those recommended.

ALS, a form of Motor Neurone Disease, takes its common name from Lou Gehrig, the highly popular American baseball player who was the first star to die of it in the 1940s.

Guariniello began quizzing former players, trainers and relatives in 1999 after several widows approached him. He has trawled the records of 24,000 professional Italian players
between 1960 and 1996 too.

As well as investigating Lou Gehrig's disease, Guariniello is looking into rates of leukaemia, cancer
and heart disease among former players.