40% of adults with HIV are considering having children

Approximately 40% of adult patients with HIV may want to have children, according to findings published in Open Forum Infectious Diseases. The desire was “surprisingly similar” at ART initiation and 2 years after successful treatment, researchers reported.

“If parents start on ART and become virally suppressed prior to pregnancy, then choose to have children and become pregnant while virally suppressed, and maintain viral suppression during pregnancy and through delivery, the chance of transmitting HIV on to their child would be essentially zero, or less than 1 in a million,” Susan E. Cohn, MD, MPH, professor of medicine in the division of infectious diseases at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, told Infectious Disease News. “Such a situation has yet to occur.”