HIV-discordant Couple Intrauterine Insemination

Brief summary

Reproduced verbatim from the official ClinicalTrials.gov record. Not medical advice.

The investigators propose to treat couples who wish to have a child in which the man is HIV-positive and the woman is HIV-negative. The investigators call these couples HIV-discordant. On the average, an HIV-positive man, who does not participate in high-risk activities, will transmit HIV to a female partner one in every one thousand acts of intercourse without a condom. To reduce transmission of HIV, HIV-discordant couples are counseled to avoid intercourse altogether, or to use condoms during every act of intercourse. In order to have a child, these patients can use donor insemination. If they wish to have a natural child of the infected man, they can use a combination of medication of the man to reduce the amount of virus in his semen, and condom use except at the time of ovulation when the woman produces an egg. This reduces the chance of infecting the woman, but studies have shown that about 4% of women will be infected with HIV using this approach. Alternatively, they can use vitro fertilization (IVF) with intra cytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) in which eggs are collected from the woman after hormone-stimulation and are fertilized in the laboratory by injecting a single washed sperm from her husband into each egg. The resulting embryos can be transferred to the wife's uterus and/or frozen for later use. These procedures are believed to minimize the risk of HIV transmission (although the number of cases is low), but IVF-ICSI is very expensive and are not an option for everyone. A simpler method used for over 15 years in Europe is to collect the man's semen, wash the sperm in the laboratory, and test the sperm sample for HIV before placing it in the woman's uterus (intrauterine insemination; IUI). Although the risk of HIV transmission to the woman is presumably not zero with this method, over 4000 inseminations reported have not resulted in infection of any female patients or resulting children.

About this trial record page

What this page shows

Public field values for ClinicalTrials.gov record NCT00975546, including study identification, conditions, interventions, eligibility (age, sex, healthy volunteer), timeline, and U.S. site list.

What this page does not do

No medical advice, eligibility judgments, treatment recommendations, study quality scoring, or AI-generated medical summaries. No site contact phone numbers, emails, or investigator names.

Where the data comes from

Sourced from the official ClinicalTrials.gov public API. The official record is the source of truth.

Last refresh

Last update posted Dec 1, 2015 · Synced Sep 8, 2026

Related: full search, browse by condition, browse by drug or therapy, browse by sponsor, browse by U.S. city.