LONDON – Drugs used to treat HIV could potentially be used to treat multiple sclerosis in the future, experts have said after new research showed that people with the virus have a lower risk of developing MS.
Researchers led by Australia’s Julian Gold, a professor at the Prince of Wales Hospital in Sydney, found that people with a HIV infection have a significantly lower risk of developing the debilitating condition.
They say the chronic dampening down of the immune system as a result of HIV or the antiretroviral drugs used to treat it could be the reason behind the lowered risk.
If further work confirms the link, there could be a major advance in the fight against MS, the scientists wrote in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry.
In 2011, doctors reported on the case of a 26-year-old Australian man who was diagnosed with MS several months after being confirmed as having HIV.
The sclerosis symptoms disappeared completely after the patient started taking anti-HIV drugs and remained that way throughout the following 12 years in which his health was monitored.
This was followed by a Danish study, which tried to see whether antiretroviral drugs may treat or slow progression of MS, but its sample size was too small to throw up a solid conclusion. In the latest study, Gold’s team looked at a British databank describing details of hospital treatment in England between 1999 and 2011.
