Prevention of postpartum haemorrhage with sublingual misoprostol or oxytocin: a double-blind randomised controlled trial

What Was Tested

Researchers studied Oxytocin in this randomized controlled trial publication.

Chi-square and bootstrapped Student's t-tests were used to test categorical and continuous outcomes, respectively.

Why It Was Studied

A cohort of 652 consenting eligible pregnant women admitted to the labour room.

Who Took Part

According to the abstract, 652 women were involved.

PubMed indexes the participants as young adults and adults, women only.

Subjects were assigned to receive the study medications and placebos within 1 minute of clamping and cutting the cord by computer-generated randomisation.

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study.

The women were allocated by chance, so the Oxytocin group and the comparison group should start out alike.

Blinding on both sides kept the women and researchers unaware of who received Oxytocin.

Some women received a placebo instead of Oxytocin, giving a reference point.

A teaching hospital: J N Medical College, Belgaum, India.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Administration, Sublingual, Misoprostol, Oxytocics, Oxytocin, Postpartum Hemorrhage and Powders.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Oxytocin in 652 women.

With several hundred people or more, it is a fairly large study for this kind of research.

The abstract goes on to report its results in about 9 sentences; this page does not restate them, so read the paper for the findings and their limits.

The publication is from 2012 (BJOG : an international journal of obstetrics and gynaecology), a journal based in England.

More context: the Oxytocin compound page, all human trials.