CNN: Patient, doctors encouraged by ALS trial

A little more than two years ago, Ted Harada felt his left leg weakening, and he found himself quickly running out of breath. Doctors first thought he had asthma, but in May 2010 they told him he probably had ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease.

In August 2010, doctors confirmed Harada, then 38, had the fatal disease, and he knew it was progressing.

"Every month they [doctors] could see deterioration," Harada said.

ALS patients lose muscle function in the lungs until they can no longer breathe. Most people with ALS die from respiratory failure within three to five years of first symptoms, according to the National Institute of Health. The disease causes nerves to wither and the lungs to stop working. About 10% of ALS patients live 10 years or longer.

Harada joined a clinical trial at Emory University in Atlanta, where doctors were injecting neural stem cells -- the precursors to nerve cells -- into the lower spinal cord of ALS patients.

Before the procedure, Harada walked with a cane and would get winded just by walking to the mailbox. He had to quit his job as a manager for a shredding company. He was so tired he couldn't play with his three children. He was too weak to pick up his youngest child. He couldn't even open a Ziploc bag.

Harada hoped the treatment would help, but he didn't expect it to. However, two weeks after getting the stem cell injections in March, he says he started to feel better.

"It's been nothing short of miraculous," he says. "I cannot begin to explain the difference it has made."

He hasn't touched his cane in months, he says, and his breathing has improved.

"I was afraid I would wake up and the improvements would be gone," Harada said.

Dr. Jonathan Glass, who is overseeing the clinical trial at Emory, and Dr. Nicholas Boulis, who invented the surgical procedure used to inject the stem cells, explained to patients that participation in the trial would not cure or even benefit them personally, but it would help doctors learn more about how to treat ALS in the future.

The first phase of any clinical trial is to prove that a treatment won't injure patients, not that the treatment works, said Dr. Eva Feldman, who designed the clinical trial at Emory... Read more here.