Message from the Director
UC Davis Multidisciplinary ALS Clinic

ALS is a tough disease. Here at UC Davis, we are dedicated to fighting this disease with the best tools available today – but we're also striving to develop better treatments for tomorrow so that we can reach a cure for the disease.

Because you are visiting our website, I am sure that you are also committed to fighting ALS, either as a person who may have the disease, one who is living with ALS, somebody with a loved one with ALS, or as a student or researcher trying to do better for those suffering from ALS. We are trying to fight not only hard but also smart – and that is why we formed the UC Davis ALS clinic in 2009.

We built the clinic on four cornerstones:

1) Correct diagnosis

ALS can look very different in different people and there are other diseases that can appear much like ALS.  We make sure to exclude other diseases and treat them when we find them.

2) Multidisciplinary Team Care

By bringing together specialists who are knowledgeable about the specific problems that ALS can cause, we are able to create care plans that are comprehensive and help the whole person.

3) Education

We educate our patients about what ALS is and how we can treat it. Our patients and the ALS team also educate physicians and therapists in training so that they recognize and understand the challenges that ALS presents.

4) Research

Through research we strive to understand ALS so that we can learn better ways to treat the disease.  We engage ALS in many ways.  In the immediate term we conduct studies to figure out why ALS occurs and what makes ALS progress the way it does, to find ways of helping people to live better with ALS, and to treat the disease with promising experimental therapies. In the long term we are working to develop stem cell treatments for ALS through the UC Davis Institute for Regenerative Cures.

If you or a loved one have or may have ALS, we would like to try to help you in this fight.  Please contact our clinical coordinator, Michelle, at 916-734-6304.

If you would like to help us fight the disease, please consider volunteering as a study participant, as a volunteer in clinic, or by otherwise supporting us.  Please call us at 916-734-6304.

Today I lost a person I greatly respected to ALS, but I care for many more patients who are living with this disease. It is my strongest wish that this will be the last person I lose to ALS.  That is why I will continue working to stop this disease.

Warm regards,
Nanette Joyce, D.O., M.A.S.
ALS Clinic Director