Pregnancy does not accelerate progression of HIV-1 infection

HIV-infected women who want to have children can be reassured that pregnancy will not accelerate progression of their disease,

Dr. Laurence Meyer of Hopital de Bicetre, Le Kremlin-Bicetre, France, and colleagues report in the October 20th issue of the journal AIDS. “We found in combining two large French SEROCO and SEROGEST prospective cohorts of 365 HIV-infected patients with a known date of seroconversion that women who delivered after HIV infection did not progress to AIDS more rapidly than women who did not become pregnant while HIV-infected,”

Dr. Meyer told Reuters Health. “We confirmed this result in various subgroups of our population in order to limit potential biases,” Dr. Meyer and colleagues point out in the paper. Combined data analysis revealed that the adjusted relative risk of progression to AIDS associated with pregnancy was 0.7, the team reports. This is in line with prior studies on pregnancy and progression to AIDS, according to the team. “This was important to confirm since we might expect that more women may want now to become pregnant in the HAART era – which has dramatically improved their prognosis,” Dr. Meyer said.