- Oral presentation
- Open Access
- Published:
Is marital status and information of the father associated with access to prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission?
Retrovirology volume 6, Article number: O20 (2009)
Background
A previous survey conducted between 1997 and 2004 in the CO1-ANRS French Perinatal Cohort (EPF) showed that geographical origin of the mothers was associated with late diagnosis of HIV during pregnancy. We did not take into account marital status and socio-economical characteristics of both mothers and fathers in that survey. Such data are available since 2005 in EPF.
Objective
We aimed to describe socio-economical and marital status of HIV-infected pregnant women, and information of the father about his and her virological status. We also studied whether such factors were associated with late diagnosis (at third gestational trimester), late treatment (initiation of antiretroviral therapy after 31 gestational weeks) and/or detectable viral load (≥ 50 cp/mL) at delivery.
Methods
All HIV-infected pregnant women, enrolled in 2005 and 2006 in EPF were eligible for this analysis.
Results
Among the 1423 mothers included, 75% originated from sub-Saharan African countries, 36% were unemployed, 37% lived alone. In 5% of cases, the father was unknown. Among the others, 64% came from sub-Saharan African countries and 15% were unemployed. In 18% of cases, physicians did not have information about the virological status of the fathers. For the others, they reported that 15% were not tested, 28% were infected by HIV and 57% were non infected. For one fifth of the pregnant women, the father was not informed about the HIV-infection of the mother. Geographical origin remained associated with diagnosis during pregnancy however the difference was smaller than previously. Compared with women living in couple, women living alone had more often late diagnosis during pregnancy (3.7% vs 1.6%; p = 0.03), late treatment (8.9 vs 5.8; p = 0.04) and detectable viral load at delivery (37.2% vs 32.4%; p = 0.07). Late diagnosis, late treatment and detectable viral load at delivery were also more frequent when the father was not tested for HIV (compared with both infected and non infected fathers), and when the father was not informed of the HIV-infection of the woman.
Conclusion
These preliminary results suggest that marital situation of the pregnant women and knowledge of the fathers concerning his and her HIV status are associated with optimal strategies for prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
About this article
Cite this article
Jasseron, C., Mandelbrot, L., Blanche, S. et al. Is marital status and information of the father associated with access to prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission?. Retrovirology 6 (Suppl 1), O20 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1186/1742-4690-6-S1-O20
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/1742-4690-6-S1-O20
Keywords
- Infectious Disease
- Pregnant Woman
- Marital Status
- Optimal Strategy
- Geographical Origin