Six versus twelve hours of single-balloon catheter placement with oxytocin administration for labor induction: a randomized controlled trial

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial paper looks at Oxytocin.

This study aimed to evaluate whether women who undergo induction of labor with a single-balloon catheter and oxytocin have a shorter time to delivery with planned removal of the catheter at 6 vs 12 hours.

Why It Was Studied

Induction of labor is common in the United States.

Who Took Part

According to the abstract, 89 women were involved.

By PubMed's age tags, the people studied were teenagers, young adults, adults and middle-aged adults, women only.

Term women, both nulliparous and multiparous, aged 18 to 50 years old with cephalic singletons were included if they were undergoing induction of labor with a Bishop score of <6 and cervical dilation of <2 cm.

Women were randomized to planned removal of the single-balloon catheter at 6 hours vs 12 hours.

How the Study Was Run

The researchers set it up as a randomized study.

Random assignment meant chance, not the researchers, decided who got Oxytocin and who got the comparison, which limits bias.

In this randomized controlled trial, induction of labor was performed using a combination of single-balloon catheter and oxytocin.

The primary outcome was time from catheter insertion to delivery.

The researchers were powered to show a 4-hour time difference with a sample size of 89 women per group (n=178).

Planned sensitivity analyses were performed to account for cesarean delivery in labor.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Catheterization, Catheters, Cervical Ripening, Cesarean Section, Combined Modality Therapy, Labor, Induced and Outcome Assessment, Health Care.

The authors tagged it with the keywords balloon catheter, combination of labor induction methods and time to delivery.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized study of Oxytocin in 89 women.

Results are reported in around 6 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2021 (American journal of obstetrics and gynecology), a journal based in United States.

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