Strength and limitations
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that is done on south Asian population with such large sample size. A small study was done in India by Pitchaimuthu and Bhaskaran with 156 primigravidas and concluded that mean rate of cervical dilatation in active phase in Indian women was approximately equivalent to the lowest acceptable rate of cervical dilatation in Friedman’s study12.
There are few limitations, like women that are having caesarean section for labor dystocia have different patterns of labor curves, that we have not mentioned, because only 4% of women underwent caesarean section for protraction or arrest disorder in both groups, and this might had not affected our results. It was also a single centre study reflecting only Indian population. Due to different demographic and anthropometric measurements in different regions of south Asian population, caution is warranted before extrapolating results to different regions. Due to small sample size, further large scale, multi centred study is needed to generalise the results in whole population.