Hyoscine Butylbromide and the Duration of Labor: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis Study

Objectives: Hyoscine butylbromide is one of the drugs that is used to shorten prolonged labor and helps to decrease the complications and pain related to prolonged labor. To prescribe this drug, understanding its effect on the duration of labor is important through summarizing the available primary study results. Therefore, the present study aimed to determine the effect of hyoscine butylbromide in shortening the duration of labor through summarizing the available primary evidence. Materials and Methods: To this end, different electronic databases were searched including the International Scientific Indexing Web of Science, PubMed/Medline, and Scopus in order to find English published articles during 2000-2017. The obtained data were by Stata software. Finally, the effect of hyoscine butylbromide was estimated by the mean difference (MD) and CI as the summary measures using a random-effects meta-analysis model. Results: Based on the results, hyoscine butylbromide significantly reduced the duration of labor in the intervention group when compared to the placebo group in the first (MD = -67.77 minutes, 95% CI, -90.98 to -44.56) and second stages of labor (MD=-2.76 minutes, 95% CI, -4.79 to -0.74). However, it failed to significantly decrease the duration of labor in the third stage (MD = -0.45 minutes, 95% CI, -1.45 to 0.56) in the intervention group. Conclusions: In general, hyoscine butylbromide led to a significant reduction in the duration of labor in the first and second stages while it caused no significant decrease in its duration in the third stage. Thus, hyoscine butylbromide could be used for reducing labor duration in the first and second stages of delivery.