Former Springbok captain and Rugby World Cup-winning halfback Joost van der Westhuizen has been told he may only have a couple of years to live after being diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease.
Doctors have suspected since May that the 40-year-old suffered from a motor neuron disease.
A neuromuscular specialist says van der Westhuizen has an 80 per cent chance of living between two and five more years.
The disease is incurable and almost always fatal, gradually leading to paralysis, speech and swallowing difficulties and problems with breathing.
British scientist Stephen Hawking is one of the more famous people with the disease, which strikes one to three people out of every 100,000.C