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.