Progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy medical therapy

Overview
There is no known cure. In some cases, the disease slows or stops if the patient's immune system improves; some AIDS patients with PML have been able to survive for several years, with the advent of highly active antiretroviral therapy(HAART).

AIDS patients who start HAART after being diagnosed with PML tend to have a slightly longer survival time than patients who were already on HAART and then develop PML (Wyen et al., 2004). A rare complication of effective HAART is immune reconstitution inflammatory syndrome (IRIS), in which increased immune system activity actually increases the damage caused by the infection; though IRIS is often manageable with other types of infections, it is extremely dangerous if it occurs in PML (Vendrely et al., 2005).

Other antiviral agents that have been studied as possible treatments for PML include cidofovir and interleukin-2, but this research is still preliminary.

Cytarabine (A.K.A. ARA-C), a chemotherapy drug approved by the US FDA to treat certain cancers, has been prescribed on an experimental basis for a small number of non-AIDS PML patients. Cytarabine is reported to have stabilized the neurological condition of a minority of these patients (Aksamit, 2001). One patient regained some cognitive function lost by PML (Langer-Gould et al., 2005).