Main body
A hypertensive emergency of pregnancy is one of the life threatening
complications encountered in obstetrics. Management of hypertension in
pregnancy is a challenging task, because drastic reduction of BP leads
to uteroplacental insufficiency & that may lead to intrauterine fetal
death and continuation of pregnancy with severe hypertension leads to
adverse feto-maternal outcome. While there are a wide variety of
pharmaceutical agents available, the mechanism of action and
contraindications of each must guide the choice of treatment for optimal
care. Although both labetalol & nifedipine are better alternative to
previously used hydralazine,our study showed nifedipine controls severe
hypertension more rapidly and with fewer doses without significant
overshoot hypotension & other maternal & fetal side effects.
Strength and limitations – Strength of the study are firstly
the participants were diverse in socioeconomic indicators thereby
enhancing the generalisability of our findings. Secondly as this study
relied on BP measurements hence the BP was recorded by trained
professionals using a standard protocol. The limitations include
firstly, the sample size of the study was small for the result to be
significant enough to be applicable to the general population but it was
big enough to be significant for the study population. Secondly, it was
a randomised control study but not double blind so there is a chance of
observer bias. Also the long term outcome was not observed. Hence to
overcome these further multicentric studies should be undertaken to
evaluate the applicability of our result to the entire region.