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Antiretroviral prophylaxis for prevention of mother to child transmission of HIV through breastfeeding: asystematic review and meta-analysis of infant treatment regimens

A systematic review and meta-analysis was conducted to evaluate the efficacy of different infant antiretroviral (ARV) prophylaxis regimens for prevention of mother to child transmission (MTCT) of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection in breastfeeding infants who were born to HIV positive mothers but were HIV uninfected at birth.
The systematic review of the literature published during January 2000 to April 2012 resulted in ten randomized and controlled clinical studies which met the study inclusion criteria. Two datasets were identified from the ten selected clinical trials. One dataset contains six studies evaluating short-course ARV prophylaxis regimens, and the second dataset contains four studies evaluating short-course versus extended ARV prophylaxis regimens.
The odds ratio was used as the effect size to measure the efficacy between two comparative infant ARV prophylaxis regimens. Meta-analyses were conducted to assess the overall (pooled) treatment effect of the two comparative infant ARV prophylaxis regimens of the two datasets. The pooled ARV treatment effect was calculated as a weighted average of the effect estimated in the individual studies. If no heterogeneity was identified, a fixed-effect meta-analysis by the Mantel-Haenszel method was used. The random-effects method was used when there was heterogeneity in the meta-analysis. The inverse-variance method was used in the random-effects method of meta-analysis. Heterogeneity in the meta-analysis was accessed by the Chi-squared (χ2) test and I2 test. The combined sample size of all ten clinical trials was a total of 10,316 breastfeeding infants, and the overall postnatal HIV transmission rate regardless of ARV regimens and the timing of HIV infection status was approximately 8.7%. The overall HIV transmission rates of the short-course ARV prophylaxis regimen groups were 10.3% at 4-8 weeks and 9.0% at 6-9 months, respectively. The overall late postnatal HIV transmission rate (at 6-9 months after birth) was 5.5% in the extended ARV prophylaxis regimen group. The first dataset contains six randomized and controlled studies to evaluate the efficacy outcome (defined as the unadjusted HIV infection status at 4-8 weeks after birth) of two short-course infant ARV prophylaxis regimens, the nevirapine (NVP) regimen and the zidovudine (ZDV) with or without combination of lamivudine (3TC) or NVP regimen. Due to the existence of substantial heterogeneity, a random-effects method was used to test for the overall treatment effect. The results show that there was no significant difference between the two short-course infant ARV prophylaxis regimens (odds ratio:1.07; 95% CI: 0.69-1.66; Z=0.31, p=0.76). The results of the meta-analysis of five comparative short-course versus extended infant ARV prophylaxis regimens from four randomized and controlled clinical trials, demonstrate a favorable efficacy outcome (defined as the unadjusted HIV infection status at 6-9 months after birth), of the extended ARV regimens. There was no heterogeneity found in this dataset. There was a highly significant difference in the overall effect between the two ARV prophylaxis regimens by a fixed-effect model (odds ratio: 1.72; 95% CI:1.45-2.04; Z=0.68, p<0.00001). In summary, there was no significant difference in the overall treatment effect in reducing the early postnatal MTCT of HIV infection by infant short-course regimens of ARV prophylaxis, which include NVP, ZDV and their combination regimens. In comparison with the short-course ARV regimens, the extended ARV prophylaxis further reduced the risk of the late postnatal MTCT of HIV infection in breastfeeding infants. / published_or_final_version / Public Health / Master / Master of Public Health

  1. 10.5353/th_b4842658
  2. b4842658
Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:HKU/oai:hub.hku.hk:10722/179943
Date January 2012
CreatorsWu, Lucy, Mimi.
PublisherThe University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong)
Source SetsHong Kong University Theses
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypePG_Thesis
Sourcehttp://hub.hku.hk/bib/B48426581
RightsThe author retains all proprietary rights, (such as patent rights) and the right to use in future works., Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License
RelationHKU Theses Online (HKUTO)

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