Pregnancy doubles HIV risk in men

Men face double the risk of being infected with HIV, if their HIV positive partner becomes pregnant, say researchers.

While a number of studies have shown women are at increased risk of catching HIV from an infected partner during pregnancy, it now seems that men also are at higher risk.

In the two year study, researchers from the University of Washington and the University of Nairobi tracked 3,321 couples in which one partner was HIV-infected.

All study volunteers lived in Botswans, Kanya, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia or Uganda.

During this time a total of 823 pregnancies occurred.

The researchers found that pregnancy increased the risk of female-to-male and male-to-female HIV infection.

It's thought that changes in a woman's immune system which occur during pregnancy may make her more susceptible to being infected with the virus, but the results from the study also showed that factors outside pregnancy such as sexual behaviour may also add to the increased risk in women.

With men, however, the link between pregnancy and increased risk of HIV infection was much clearer, even after taking into account whether the men had unprotected sex or had been circumcised.

Their infected partner's viral load or CD4 count, which give an indication of how the severity of infection did not affect the man's risk of being infected.

The study authors suggested that physiological and immunological changes that occur with pregnancy may make women more infectious, although at this stage it's not clear what these are, and added that more research would be needed to confirm this.

The research was presented at the International Microbicided Conference in Pittsburg.

This article was published on Mon 24 May 2010