Short-course nevirapine doesn't improve standard preventive therapy.(Brief Article)

2002 SEP 5 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- by Michael Greer, senior medical writer - Short-course nevirapine therapy doesn't help prevent vertical HIV transmission from women with access to standard treatment regimens, researchers argue.

"A 2-dose intrapartum/newborn nevirapine regimen reduced perinatal human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) transmission in Ugandan women not receiving antenatal antiretroviral therapy (ART)," explained Alejandro Dorenbaum and colleagues at the University of California in San Francisco and other institutions in the United States, France, and the United Kingdom.

ART provides its own defense against mother-child HIV transmission, which was not improved by additional nevirapine treatment, Dorenbaum and coauthors said.

They assessed the benefits of supplemental nevirapine therapy in 1270 expectant HIV+ mothers, recruited while undergoing ART at clinics in the United States, Europe, Brazil, and the Bahamas. Participating mothers-to-be were given a 200 mg nevirapine tablet or a placebo during labor, with their newborn children receiving a 2 mg/kg oral dose 2 or 3 days after birth, according to the report.

At roughly 1.5%, perinatal infection rates were virtually identical for nevirapine- and placebo-treated women, study data showed. The only factors with a significant impact on transmission risk were a low CD4 cell count and an elevated viral load at delivery. Women in both treatment arms were offered the option of cesarean delivery, with 34% accepting ...