Effectiveness of evidence based regimen for medical abortion over conventional methods

Abstract

Background: Medical abortion is a means of medical termination of pregnancy by drugs alone. This can be done upto 63 days using mifepristone and misoprostol tablets. For the conventional method, patient has to come to the hospital 3 times. In our study we reduced the interval between the drugs there by reducing the number of hospital visits. The objectives were to study the reduction of induction abortion interval following administration of evidence based regimen and to compare the proportion of patients developing complications in both the groups.Methods: It was a comparative study conducted at Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Govermnent MedicalCollege Kottayam, Kerala, India from May 2015 to November 2015.Results: The mean induction abortion interval in experimental group was 14.3 hours and in control group, it was 60.4 hours which was found to be statistically significant. Only 3 patients (7%) of experimental group had side effects whereas 12 patients. (17.4%) had side effects in the control group. Major side effects encountered were severe abdominal pain and severe bleeding per vaginum. Evidence based regimen consist of administration of mifepristone 200mg and vaginal misoprostol 600µg 6 hours later for termination of pregnancy up to 63 days could reduce the induction abortion interval by 46 hours and had less side effects.Conclusions: As it reduces the induction abortion Interval and complications we feel that the evidence based regimen for Medical Termination of Pregnancy is superior to the FDA approved regimen.