Pre-Morbid Risk Factors for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis: Prospective Cohort Study

In the absence of effective treatments for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a neurodegenerative disorder with high case fatality, there is a clear need to identify its primary risk factors.

UK Biobank is a prospective cohort study in which baseline data were captured between 2006 and 2010 in 502,649 participants aged 37 to 73 years. Follow-up for ALS hospitalisations and death was made via national registries.

Eleven years of event surveillance gave rise to 301 hospitalisations and 279 deaths due to ALS. After adjustment for selected confounding factors, being older (hazard ratio per 10 year increase; 95% confidence interval: 1.92; 1.58, 2.33) and male (1.37; 1.00, 1.87) were associated with elevated rates of hospitalisation for ALS. Similar effects were apparent when death ascribed to the disorder was the outcome of interest. Of the remaining 23 social, biological, and behavioural risk indices, however, there was only a suggestion that taller people experienced an increased risk of hospitalisation (per SD increase: 1.31; 1.09, 1.59).

In the present, large-scale study, other than well known associations, we did not find convincing evidence of links with ALS for other risk indices.