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Study concludes benefits of anti-HIV therapy during pregnancy outweigh risks.
2002 JUL 9 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- A new study found no association between the use of an anti-HIV treatment that uses a combination of drugs during pregnancy and an increased risk of such birth complications as premature delivery, stillbirth, and low Apgar scores. However, the study did find a slightly increased risk of very low-birth-weight infants (infants weighing less than 1500 g) among women treated with a combination of drugs that included a class of drugs known as protease inhibitors.
The study, a combined analysis of seven studies of U.S. pregnant women with HIV, appears in the June 13, 2002, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, and was funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). The study was conducted by researchers at NICHD, NIAID, and several academic and medical institutions.
The U.S. researchers undertook the study in response to an earlier Swiss study that showed that HIV-positive women who took a combination of anti-HIV drugs that included protease inhibitors were more likely to give birth prematurely than were HIV-positive women who did not take protease inhibitors.
"Combination therapy has proven invaluable in preventing the transmission of HIV from mother to child," said Duane Alexander, MD, director of the NICHD. "This study did not find any association between combination therapy and several adverse pregnancy outcomes. However, a small association between combination therapy with protease inhibitors and very low-birth-weight needs to be investigated further."
Very-low-birth weight infants are at increased risk for infant death and disability. Although they account for only 1% of all births in the United States, they account for more than 40% of infant mortality. Very low-birth-weight infants who do survive often require lengthy and expensive intensive care treatment.
There are three categories of drugs used to treat HIV infection. Reverse transcriptase inhibitors, including the nucleoside and nonnucleoside categories, interfere with an enzyme called reverse transcriptase, which the virus needs to make copies of itself. Protease inhibitors interfere with the enzyme protease, which allows HIV to infect cells. Forms of anti-HIV therapy include giving only one ...
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