Sunday, August 26, 2012

No Virus to Blame for New AIDS-Like Disease—It’s an Autoimmune Response

In 2004, medical researchers began noticing cases where patients, primarily middle-aged Asians, sought treatment for frequent opportunistic infections. Developing these infections, which mainly affect people with compromised immune systems, is a key sign of AIDS, and yet these patients test negative for HIV, the AIDS virus.
According to a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, an autoimmune response—when your immune system attacks your own body—triggers the immunodeficiency. But we still don’t know why the autoimmune response develops abruptly at around age 50.
For the NEJM study, the researchers wanted to see whether these patients, when compared with healthy subjects and with people who had other infections, had anything unusual going on in their blood. 203 HIV-negative Thai and Taiwanese volunteers, to that end, provided medical histories and blood samples to researchers from the National Institutes of Health. Some participants were currently struggling with at least one opportunistic infection, such as Mycobacterium abcessus. Others acted as controls: Some had tuberculosis, which is related to M. abcessus, and showed no signs that their infection was due to an immunodeficiency, while others were healthy.

Read more: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2012/08/24/no-virus-to-blame-for-new-aids-like-disease-it%E2%80%99s-an-autoimmune-response/

No comments: