Surveillance Monitoring for ART Toxicities Study in HIV Uninfected Children Born to HIV Infected Women

Many antiretroviral therapy (ART) medications given to a pregnant woman cross the placenta and can be detected in the amniotic fluid and cord blood resulting in substantial fetal exposure. Therefore, there is concern about toxicity of the drugs in the fetus and infant. It is noteworthy that none of the currently approved ART medications for the prevention of maternal to fetal transmission of HIV are in Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Pregnancy Category A (no fetal risk ascertained in adequately controlled human studies). Thus, there is continued need to examine the toxicity of ART in HIV transmission prevention for the short-term toxicity of newer agents and combinations as well as the unanswered questions of longer term toxicity and subtle adverse effects.

The study will use a registry approach to conduct active surveillance among children < 12 years of age at enrollment. Occurrences of abnormalities from ART exposure in utero and/or in the first two months of life will be sought in multiple domains, including metabolic, growth, cardiac, neurologic, neurodevelopmental, behavior, language, and hearing. Clinical and laboratory data will be examined for abnormalities through a hierarchy of evaluations: adverse events (AE) will be identified → selected AEs will trigger predefined additional evaluations → significant observations will be defined as cases → a pattern of significant study-wide cases will be defined as signals. The incidence of these events of interest will be monitored over time and by ART regimen, and compared with historical data that may be suggestive of a signal. Some signals may be testable using existing and/or previously collected data, while other signals may indicate the need for additional hypothesis-driven studies outside of SMARTT.

The objectives of SMARTT are:

1. To estimate the occurrence of potential ART-related toxicities through an ongoing surveillance system among HIV-uninfected children born to mothers with HIV infection with and without exposure to ART in utero and/or in the first two months of life and compare the occurrences of these outcomes with other sources of data as well as by ART exposures; and
2. To actively encourage hypothesis-driven studies to confirm that the signals are due to ART exposure in utero and/or in the first two months of life. Note that the full design and execution of these studies may be beyond the scope of the SMARTT study but will be facilitated by SMARTT.

The specific aims of SMARTT are: