Brief Report: Vaginal Viral Shedding With Undetectable Plasma HIV Viral Load in Pregnant Women Receiving 2 Different Antiretroviral Regimens: A Randomized Clinical Trial.

BACKGROUND

Pregnant women using antiretrovirals (ARVs) may have persistent vaginal viral shedding, which could be associated with sexual and perinatal HIV transmission. However, there are scant data on vaginal viral load (VVL) in pregnant women with undetectable plasma viral load (PVL).

METHODS

This study was a post hoc analysis of an open-label randomized trial to evaluate the virologic response of 2 ART regimens. The participants were ART-naive women living with HIV initiating ART regimens between 20 and 36 weeks of pregnancy recruited at 19 clinical sites in 6 countries. Participants were randomized to receive 400 mg of raltegravir 2 times a day or 600 mg of efavirenz 4 times a day in addition to 150 mg of lamivudine and 300 mg of zidovudine 2 times a day. VVL and PVL tests were performed at every study visit. The primary outcome measures were HIV-1 PVL and VVL at maternal study week 4 and rates of perinatal HIV transmission.

RESULTS

A total of 408 were enrolled, of whom 323 had VVL samples 4 weeks after enrollment and were included in this analysis. Among women with undetectable/nonquantifiable PVL during ART, the overall rate of quantifiable VVL at week 4 was 2.54% (7/275). Of the 275 with nonquantifiable PVL, 99.1% (115/116) and 96.2% (153/159) had nonquantifiable VVL in the efavirenz and raltegravir arms, respectively. None of the 7 women with quantifiable VVL at the week 4 study visit transmitted HIV to their infants.

CONCLUSIONS

Detectable VVL in pregnant women with undetectable/nonquantifiable PVL while receiving ART was rare and not associated with perinatal HIV transmission.

Informations de copyright

Copyright © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc.

Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

R.L.M. and D.E.S. report grants from US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and nonfinancial support from US Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) through Westat, Inc., during the conduct of the study, and grants from NIAID and NICHD through the University of Michigan, outside the submitted work. L.M.F. reports grants from NICHD, NIAID, and IMPAACT during the conduct of the study and additional support from the Molecular Profiling and Computational Biology Core of the University of Washington and Fred Hutch Center for AIDS Research (P30 AI027757). M.M. reports grants from NICHD and National Institutes of Health (NIH), during the conduct of the study, and grants from Merck & Co, ViiV Healthcare, and Gilead Sciences, outside the submitted work. Overall support for the International Maternal Pediatric Adolescent AIDS Clinical Trials Network (IMPAACT) was provided by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) with cofunding from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), all components of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), under Award Numbers UM1AI068632 (IMPAACT LOC), UM1AI068616 (IMPAACT SDMC), and UM1AI106716 (IMPAACTLC), and by NICHD contract number HHSN275201800001I. The remaining authors have no conflicts of interest to disclose.