Background: Untreated retained placenta is the second most common
cause of postpartum hemorrhage.
Nowadays pharmacological management of retained placenta seems to be
a good alternative to surgical intervention. Carbetocin which is an analogue
of oxytocin is a drug indicated for controlling postpartum hemorrhage
Aim: To compare carbetocin and oxytocin in terms of efficacy in the management of retained placenta
Methods: We conducted our search in
the different online databases for eligible clinical trials excluding observational studies. We used the Cochrane
risk of bias tool to perform the quality
assessment of the included trials. The
assessed outcomes include total blood
loss, duration of the third stage of labour, pre-delivery hemoglobin, postdelivery hemoglobin, manual removal
of placenta, blood transfusion, additional uterotonic agents, placenta expelled spontaneously, adherent placenta, and successful expulsions.
Results: We included four trials in our
meta-analysis. Our results yielded an
overall favoring of the carbetocin
group over the oxytocin group in
terms of total blood loss (MD = -
119.12, 95% CI [-130.76, -107.48],
p