HIV study promising for multiple sclerosis treatment

People who are HIV positive are significantly less likely to develop multiple sclerosis, according a study that may lead to new treatment for one of medicine's most confounding diseases.

Multiple sclerosis is an auto-immune disease that typically strikes women in their early 30s with neurological symptoms including blindness, paralysis and loss of feeling. There is no known cure.

But a Sydney doctor's observation that there are very few instances of people with HIV and MS has prompted international studies, and his own research,and has now found that people living with HIV are 60 per cent less likely to develop MS.

Julian Gold led a research team that tracked all 21,000 people with HIV who had been discharged from English hospitals between 1999 and 2011 and compared them to a control group of 5 million discharged patients without HIV.

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Statistically, 18 of the 21,000 HIV positive people should have developed MS, but only seven had done so, making the protective effect of HIV the largest known influence of one disease over another.

The research, published in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, leaves open the question as to whether it is HIV itself that is protecting against MS, or whether the retrovirals that HIV patients take to treat their disease are also effective against MS.

Dr Gold's feeling is that the HIV antiretroviral therapies are responsible for suppressing the symptoms of MS because the protective effect of HIV rose to 80 per cent a year after the patients were discharged from hospital. If treatment did not play a role, the protective effect would be expected to remain at 60 per cent.

An infectious diseases specialist who worked with patients at the Albion Centre in Surry Hills, Dr Gold's interest in MS came about when two of his wife's friends were diagnosed with the disease.

He made the link between HIV and MS when he realised he had never seen a patient with both diseases.

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HIV study promising for multiple sclerosis treatment