What we know and what we don’t know about perinatal Zika virus infection: a systematic review

ABSTRACT

Introduction: Zika virus (ZIKV) infection has caused the most challenging worldwide infectious epidemic outbreak in recent months. ZIKV causes microcephaly and other congenital malformations. There is a need to perform updated systematic reviews on ZIKV infection periodically because this epidemic is bringing up new evidence with extraordinary speed.

Areas covered: Evidence related to ZIKV infection in the gestational, perinatal, and early infant periods covering epidemiology, virology, pathogenesis, risk factors, time of infection during pregnancy, newborn symptoms, treatment, and vaccines. To this end, a search was performed using terms [‘Zika’] AND [‘Perinatal Infection’] OR [‘Congenital Infection’] in the PubMed® international electronic database. Out of a total of 1,538 articles published until 30 November 2017, we finally assessed 106 articles articles that were relevant to the research areas included in this study.

Expert commentary: ZIKV is a new teratogenic/neurotropic virus affecting fetuses. Many challenges are still far from being solved regarding the epidemiology, case definition, clinical and laboratory diagnosis, and preventive measures. An approach using ‘omics’ and new biomarkers for diagnosis, and a ZIKV-vaccine for treatment, might finally give us the tools to solve these challenges.

KEYWORDS:

• Arbovirus infection
• maternal-fetal infection transmission
• teratogen
• Zika virus

Acknowledgments

We thank ZIKAction consortium friends for their inspiration, valuable support and critical reading of the manuscript.

Declaration of interest

F Martinon-Torres’s research is supported by grants from Consellería de Sanidade, Xunta de Galicia, Instituto de Salud Carlos III (Intensificación de la actividad investigadora 2007–2017), Fondo de Investigación Sanitaria (FIS; PI070069/PI1000540/PI1601569) del Plan Nacional de I + D + I and ‘fondos FEDER’, and 2016-PG071 Consolidación e Estructuración REDES 2016GI-1344 G3VIP (Grupo Gallego de Genética Vacunas Infecciones y Pediatría, ED341D R2016/021).

The authors have no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed. Peer reviewers on this manuscript have no relevant financial or other relationships to disclose.

Additional information

Funding

This work was partially supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation program (ZIKAction, grant agreement no. 734857). Call for research: SC1-PM-22-2016: Addressing the urgent research gaps against the Zika virus and other emerging threats in Latin America.