Juliet Taylor

1 week ago | alsnewstoday.com | Juliet Taylor

My late husband, Jeff, and I shared a love of the outdoors, even though our preferred activities were often different. I loved to hike and kayak, while Jeff, who’d been injured when a car hit his bicycle in 2010 and still suffered from orthopedic pain, preferred to relax. Whether at home or traveling, many evenings found him outside with a cigar, a beer, and music playing quietly on a portable speaker.

3 weeks ago | alsnewstoday.com | Juliet Taylor

I remember the emptiness I felt the first September after graduating from college. I’d been a student for 16 of my 21 years at that time, and the void of not going back to school at the end of summer was disconcerting. For some years after that, I quietly regarded September as a symbol of unwelcome change and even loss. It was my first time experiencing sadness related to a certain time of year.

1 month ago | alsnewstoday.com | Juliet Taylor

Sometime in my mid-40s, I wrote a list of goals I wanted to achieve before turning 50. I no longer have the list, but I remember a few things on it: Learn a second language. Complete one half-marathon each year. And my then-favorite, visit 50 countries by the time I turned 50. At the time, those goals seemed attainable and were aligned with the kind of person I wanted to be — healthy, curious, and motivated. That was before my late husband, Jeff, was diagnosed with ALS when I was 48 and he was 58.

2 months ago | alsnewstoday.com | Juliet Taylor |Kristin Neva |Patricia Inacio

The weeks immediately following my late husband’s ALS diagnosis were the scariest and most unsettling of my life. Even with Jeff’s physical symptoms pointing toward ALS, nothing could’ve prepared us to actually hear those words when they were delivered in a windowless examination room in Baltimore, in November 2018. In many respects, those initial days of shock and despair were more difficult than any that followed.

2 months ago | alsnewstoday.com | Lindsey Shapiro |Juliet Taylor |Marisa Wexler |Joana Carvalho

Certain subsets of natural killer (NK) cells, a part of the immune system, were elevated in the blood of people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), where they showed altered gene activity and signaling patterns, a study found. One subset was associated with altered immune signaling, while another was linked to neurodegeneration.