Filling in the gaps toward the safest regimen
“This study spans 25 years, so it covers a lot of the history of HIV in pregnancy and is reassuring around using ART in pregnancy,” Shahin Lockman, MD, told this news organization. Dr. Lockman is an associate professor of infectious diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a co-PI of the Botswana Clinical Trials Unit at the Botswana Harvard AIDS Institute Partnership. She was not involved in the study. “One of the worst things for a mother and for pregnancy outcomes, for the fetus and baby’s health and development, is uncontrolled maternal HIV,’’ she said.
Dr. Lockman also noted potential confounders that drive poor birth outcomes in Southern African women, compared with U.S. women, making comparisons between this and other observational studies difficult. Still, she said that the question is not whether women should be receiving treatment but whether or not there are differences between antiretroviral regimens.
“One of the areas that we did not go deeper into was the subtype of antiretroviral therapy, given the relatively small study numbers [did not] allow us to do a robust analysis,” Dr. Venkatesh said.
Rather, he emphasized that the findings might lend more weight to speculation that immunologic characteristics associated with HIV status and immunotherapy – such as low CD4 cell counts prior to delivery, or duration of HIV infection – may be important drivers of adverse birth outcomes among women with HIV taking ART.
And at least in this cohort, many of these characteristics were similar between the treatment groups.
Both researchers agree that the findings – while reassuring – highlight the importance of collecting robust obstetric and safety data as part of prospective databases of individuals living with HIV, not only in resource-limited settings but also among the domestic U.S. population.
“We’ve learned a lot over the last 10 years,” Dr. Lockman said. “Some regimens (like lopinavir/ritonavir or nevirapine) are associated with significantly worse birth outcomes, whereas efavirenz doesn’t seem to be, or less so, and dolutegravir seems to be associated with even better outcomes. So, I think that where we are moving is to regimens that are the safest.”
Moving forward, Dr. Venkatesh explained, not only should researchers focus on exploring which antiretrovirals are safest in this context but also if the use of preexposure prophylaxis during conception periods affects birth outcomes.
Dr. Venkatesh and Dr. Lockman report no relevant financial relationships.
A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.