AIDS and ALS

Abstract

The September issue of Neurology contains two reports that a version of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) can occur secondary to infection of the AIDS virus, and promisingly, can be treated with antiviral drugs. Researchers from Rothschild Hospital in Paris reviewed 13 years of HIV cases with neurological complications and found ALS-like syndromes, although rare, were almost 30-fold more prevalent than expected. HIV-associated ALS does start younger and progress more rapidly than classic ALS, but the good news is that antiretroviral therapy effectively reduced symptoms. Similarly, a communication from researchers at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York reports of a 32-year-old woman who presented with a rapidly progressing ALS-like syndrome and was later found to be HIV positive and responsive to antiviral treatment. These findings lend new support to a long-held suspicion that the selective yet devastating degeneration of motor neurons in ALS has a viral etiology. (Neurology 57, 995–1001 and 1094–1097). LO