A new study based on research out of Harvard University has shown that a drug that doctors prescribed to women to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV may have minor but significant effects on the unborn baby’s development.
According to UPI, researchers at Harvard University have found that the antiretroviral drug atazanavir could effect the language and social-emotional development of their unborn child as a result of taking the drug.
Doctors prescribe atazanavir as a means of lowering the odds that HIV positive mothers transmit the virus to their child.
The effects of the drug, those that affect the child’s development, seem to occur regardless of whether or not the child gets HIV from their mother.
The study involved 167 women who received atazanavir during pregnancy and 750 who did not. Researchers compared the effect of the drug by studying the babies based on developmental baselines once the children turned 1 year old.
The mothers taking atazanavir during pregnancy had children with lower language and social-emotional development scores compared to the children born to mothers not on the drug.
However, the study points out that the differences between the two groups are small. The language score of the babies whose mothers took atazanavir was 3 points lower on average, while the social-emotional score was 5 points lower on average.
Researchers pointed out that the small differences do not have huge implications but are worth noting as a result of their adding another risk to the number of risk factors that children of HIV-infected mothers are exposed to.