Since its inclusion in the treatment arm of PACTG 076, intravenous (IV) AZT during labor has been an integral part of antiretroviral therapy (ART) for the prevention of mother-to-child transmission (MTCT) in high-resource countries. However, with the advent of combination ART, the benefit of this strategy has been questioned. U.S. guidelines no longer endorse the use of IV AZT for women who are receiving combination ART and have antepartum viral loads <400 copies/mL. This change was based on results from an analysis of women enrolled in the French Perinatal Cohort between 1997 and 2004.
Now, researchers have expanded the analysis to include all women enrolled in this cohort between 1997 and 2010. Of 11,538 women, 95.2% received IV AZT. The M…