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.