Saturday, December 06, 2014

Can HIV drugs help people with MS?

I’ve known a few people who had HIV/AIDS, but I know many more who have MS.  “HIV and lower risk of multiple sclerosis: beginning to unravel a mystery using a record-linked database study,” Mia L van der Kop, J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry jnnp-2014-308297 Published Online First: 4 August 2014 doi:10.1136/jnnp-2014-308297

http://jnnp.bmj.com/content/early/2014/07/16/jnnp-2014-307932

“Even though multiple sclerosis (MS) and HIV infection are well-documented conditions in clinical medicine, there is only a single case report of a patient with MS and HIV treated with HIV antiretroviral therapies. In this report, the patient's MS symptoms resolved completely after starting combination antiretroviral therapy and remain subsided for more than 12 years. Authors hypothesised that because the pathogenesis of MS has been linked to human endogenous retroviruses, antiretroviral therapy for HIV may be coincidentally treating or preventing progression of MS. This led researchers from Denmark to conduct an epidemiological study on the incidence of MS in a newly diagnosed HIV population (5018 HIV cases compared with 50 149 controls followed for 31 875 and 393 871 person-years, respectively). The incidence rate ratio for an HIV patient acquiring MS was low at 0.3 (95% CI 0.04 to 2.20) but did not reach statistical significance possibly due to the relatively small numbers in both groups. Our study was designed to further investigate the possible association between HIV and MS.”

Wouldn’t this be wonderful news?

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