Standard- or high-dose oxytocin for nulliparous women with confirmed delay in labour: quantitative and qualitative results from a pilot randomised controlled trial

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of Oxytocin, published as a randomized controlled trial.

The researchers undertook a pilot study to test the feasibility of this treatment.

Simple descriptive statistics were used, as the sample size was insufficient to evaluate clinical outcomes.

Who Took Part

According to the abstract, 94 women were involved.

PubMed tags the participants as women only.

A total of 94 consenting nulliparous women at term with confirmed delay in labour were recruited, and 18 were interviewed.

How the Study Was Run

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

Because people in this Oxytocin study were split into groups at random, differences between the groups are less likely to reflect who happened to join each one.

Neither the women nor the staff measuring them knew who was on Oxytocin, so expectations could not easily colour the readings.

It is described as a pilot, a small early test of whether a larger Oxytocin study would be practical.

Pilot double-blind randomised controlled trial.

Three teaching hospitals in the UK.

The constant comparative method was used to analyse the interviews.

What Was Measured

PubMed files the paper under topics including Delivery, Obstetric, Health Knowledge, Attitudes, Practice, Informed Consent, Interviews as Topic, Labor Stage, First, Obstetric Labor Complications and Oxytocics.

The authors tagged it with the keywords Pilot RCT, delayed labour, nulliparous and oxytocin.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and pilot study of Oxytocin in 94 women.

Its findings take up roughly 8 sentences of the abstract and are left out here on purpose; the source paper is the place to read them.

The publication is from 2013 (BJOG : an international journal of obstetrics and gynaecology), a journal based in England.

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