WASHINGTON (AFP) — Lorenzo Odone, whose illness prompted a determined effort by his parents to save him and inspired the Oscar-nominated film "Lorenzo's Oil," has died, US media reported Saturday. He was 30.
His father, Augusto Odone, told The Washington Post that Odone died Friday at his home in Virginia, of aspiration pneumonia.
Odone had been severely disabled by adrenoleukodystrophy, or ALD, a disease which causes genetic mutations that break down the neurological system. The disease usually results in brain failure and death, but Lorenzo lived 20 years longer than doctors predicted.
Augusto Odone told the daily that his son's death "was not the result of the disease" but the aspiration pneumonia, which can result from a foreign object or material inhaled into the lungs.
According to the Post, Augusto Odone credited his son's years of survival to a treatment derived from olive and rapeseed oils which he discovered shortly after his son's diagnosis in the late 1980s.
"Lorenzo's Oil" depicted the father's discovery and the touching efforts by Augusto and Michaela Odone -- portrayed in the film by Nick Nolte and Susan Sarandon, who earned an Academy Award nomination for her work -- to prolong their son's life.
Odone's mother died in 2000, and his father said he intended to have Lorenzo's remains cremated and his ashes mixed with his mother's.
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