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.