VEGFA and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis: After this fortuitous discovery, it was reported that certain VEGF haploytpes (-2578C/A, -1154G/A and -634G/C) conferred an increased susceptibility to ALS in humans, but later on in a meta-analysis conducted with more than 7000 subjects from at least eight different populations no association between these haplotypes and ALS was found (Lambrechts et al., 2009).