Fertility treatments can be done safely and effectively in couples where the man is infected with the AIDS virus and the women isn't, according to a new review of past studies.
Over the last 2 decades, researchers have improved methods of "washing" the semen of men infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Unwashed semen could pass HIV to the woman or their baby.
"I think the procedure is getting safer and safer," said Dr. Deborah Anderson, a scientist at the Boston University School of Medicine who studies HIV. She was not involved in the current research, but she told Reuters Health that washing the man's semen lowers the risk of transmission enough that "it's an acceptable ... procedure for couples that really want to have children."
In the new review, published in the journal Fertility and Sterility, researchers from the Evandro Chagas Clinical Research Institute in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil looked at 17 earlier studies involving a total of about 1,800 couples in which only the male partner had HIV.
In each of the studies, researchers performed one of two common types of fertility treatments after washing the semen. Then they recorded how often women became pregnant after the procedures. They also monitored the women and any babies they had as a result of the procedures, to see whether HIV had been passed on from the semen.
About a third of the women had a procedure in which a single sperm is injected into a single egg; then the fertilized egg is placed into the woman's womb. This kind of fertility treatment is assumed to be safer for couples in which the male partner has HIV because it is easier to ensure that the sperm being used does not have the HIV virus.
The rest of the women had sperm injected directly into the womb, when their eggs were most likely to be there.
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