Loading...
About 12% of births in the U.S. are premature, and effective treatments for preterm labor are generally lacking. Most obstetricians resort to magnesium sulfate or β-adrenergic agonists such as ritodrine — but aside from their uncertain benefits, these agents have adverse effects including maternal tachycardia, pulmonary edema, hyperglycemia, and worse. In the context of this discouraging picture, the potential for benefit from the tocolytic agent atosiban is intriguing: As a competitive antagonist that also causes downregulation of uterine oxytocin receptors, atosiban acts specifically on the uterus to inhibit the actions of oxytocin.
In this relatively small but well-constructed Korean study supported by the manufacturer of atosiban, resear…