Abstract

FIGUEROA MEDRANO, LAURA PATRICIA  and  AVILA FIGUEROA, CARLOS. Alteraciones del desarrollo neurológico en niños nacidos de madres con VIH. Perinatol. Reprod. Hum. [online]. 2004, vol.18, n.2, pp.149-155. ISSN 2524-1710.

Neurological development is a fundamental part of a child's healthy growth, however, there are factors that can stop his development or that can cause deterioration, amongst them infectious and socio-cultural factors. In some cases, children that are born from a mother infected with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) acquire the infection and in others they can escape it. Apart from the condition of their infection status, there is a subgroup of children that additionally have in uterus pharmacological exposure to antiretrovirals, used by their mothers during gestation. It is well known that children infected with HIV have a vast variety of cognitive and motor disturbances, and that as the immunodeficiency progresses, they have a risk of opportunistic infections at cerebral level. It has been demonstrated that even children without infection, but born from infected mothers are not exempt from presenting cognitive and motor disturbances. The different neurological problems that children born from HIV+ mothers present are not only explained by the child's or mother's infection, but by the presence of adverse factors, socio-cultural ones, that can affect cerebral development on different levels. Due to this situation it is important to recognize neurological alterations as early as possible with the aim of providing a timely management and even to prevent them.

Keywords : Neurological development; children; HIV.