Study sheds light on safety and efficacy of malaria treatment in pregnant women

New research published in the New England Journal of Medicine, attempts to determine best treatment for cases of malaria in pregnant women.

Researchers in the PREGACT Study Group compared four different artemisinin-based malaria treatments administered to 3,428 pregnant women with Plasmodium falciparum malaria. Analysis showed that cure rate for dihydroartemisinin-piperaquine was the highest of all the treatments with 99.2 percent efficacy, though the cure rates of the other treatments were within five percentage points. When examined for safety, artemether-lumefantrine had the lowest rates of association with adverse events. Dihydroartemisinin-piperaquine had the second best safety rating.

Researchers concluded that dihydroartemisinin-piperaquine had the best combination of safety and efficacy profiles for the treatment of malaria in pregnant women.

Rohan Hazra, MD, of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, which funded the study, told MedPage Today, "If I were an individual clinician looking at these results, I would say this is enough to say that I'd want my pregnant patient to be on the [dihydroartemisinin-piperaquine]...this was a big step, to show that [this therapy] has a lot of benefits going for it, but it probably will require another trial to convince the World Health Organization to wholeheartedly endorse it."

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