Multiple Sclerosis Discovery: The Podcast Of The Ms Discovery Forum

[intro music]   Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Eight of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m your host, Dan Keller.   This week’s podcast features an interview with researcher, Wendy Macklin, whose team studies myelination and demyelination in zebrafish and mouse animal models. But to begin, here is a brief summary of some of the topics we’ve been covering on the MS Discovery Forum at msdiscovery.org.   As listeners may already be aware, a new study suggested that infection with HIV is associated with a lower risk of developing MS. Researchers looked at a large sample of hospital records and found that individuals infected with HIV had a 62% lower risk of MS than HIV-negative individuals who were matched for age, gender, region, and socioeconomic status. The researchers think that antiretroviral drugs might be causing the protective effect, though it’s possible the infection with HIV itself somehow protects against developing MS. Antiretroviral drugs may at