Maternal plasma levels of oxytocin during physiological childbirth - a systematic review with implications for uterine contractions and central actions of oxytocin.

What It Covers

This systematic review looks at Oxytocin.

Oxytocin is a key hormone in childbirth, and synthetic oxytocin is widely administered to induce or speed labour.

Due to lack of synthetized knowledge, the researchers conducted a systematic review of maternal plasma levels of oxytocin during physiological childbirth, and in response to infusions of synthetic oxytocin, if reported in the included studies.

Who the Included Studies Covered

PubMed tags the participants as women only.

Search hits were screened on title and abstract after duplicates were removed (n = 4039), 69 articles were examined in full-text and 20 papers met inclusion criteria.

How the Review Was Done

An a priori protocol was designed and a systematic search was conducted in PubMed, CINAHL, and PsycINFO in October 2015.

As the articles differed in design and methodology used for analysis of oxytocin levels, a narrative synthesis was created and the material was categorised according to effects.

What Was Measured

Due to lack of synthetized knowledge, the researchers conducted a systematic review of maternal plasma levels of oxytocin during physiological childbirth, and in response to infusions of synthetic oxytocin, if reported in the included studies.

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Labor, Obstetric, Oxytocics, Oxytocin and Parturition.

The authors tagged it with the keywords Birth, Central effects, Infusion of synthetic oxytocin, Neurobiology, Physiological labour and Plasma levels.

What This Means in Plain Language

This is a systematic review of Oxytocin.

The abstract goes on to report its results in about 13 sentences; this page does not restate them, so read the paper for the findings and their limits.

The publication is from 2019 (BMC pregnancy and childbirth), a journal based in England.

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