Self-assessment of the outcome of first trimester medical abortion compared to routine clinic follow-up: A systematic review

Abstract

Background: Home self-administration of misoprostol for medical abortion has been suggested as safe, efficient, feasible and acceptable. However, it remains inaccessible for many women especially in low-resource settings. Administration of misoprostol at home and self-assessment by urine pregnancy tests (UPTs) to confirm complete termination of pregnancy with follow-up by home visits or telephone call after 12-15 days after the intake of mifepristone helps to de-medicalize abortion and provides privacy to women.

Objective: To assess the effectiveness, safety, and acceptability of self-assessment of the outcome of medical abortion in a non-inferiority comparison with routine clinic follow-up after medical abortion at home.

Methodology: A systematic review for randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of self-assessment of the outcome of medical abortion compared with routine clinic follow-up was conducted. The systematic review followed the Cochrane Handbook of Systematic Reviews for Intervention. A thorough search was performed in databases such as Medline, Embase, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL), Web of Science, CINAHL, British Nursing Index and Archive, Scopus and Google Scholar. Searches were also done in ClinicalTrials.Gov and WHO-ICTRP for ongoing studies.

The population was women of reproductive age, 15 years or above, who had a confirmed pregnancy and who had requested a medical termination of pregnancy up to 9 weeks (63 days) of gestation age, which they performed at home. The intervention, self-assessment of outcome done by UPTs by women themselves at home combined with a follow-up by telephone call or home visit to confirm the complete termination of pregnancy, was compared with assessment of the outcome of medical abortion performed by medical/health care personnel during routine clinic follow-up visits. The primary outcome was effectiveness of self-assessment of the outcome of medical abortion compared to routine clinic follow-up, while its safety and acceptability were the secondary outcomes.

Risk of bias (RoB) assessment was performed for each included RCT in accordance with the criteria in the Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions. The outcomes were analysed as risk ratios (RR) with 95% confidence intervals (CI). Review Manager 5.3 (RevMan 2014) was used to pool the data (meta-analysis) and to generate forest plots to display the results. A GRADE (Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development, and Evaluation) assessment was conducted to assess the certainty of the evidence.

Results: Four studies met the inclusion criteria (n = 5394 participants). All were RCTs, two of these were non-inferiority RCTs, which described the results of self-assessment of the outcome of induced abortion with mifepristone and misoprostol at home. The studies were conducted in low to high resource setting countries. There was low risk of bias associated with the included studies. Pooled analyses from all studies showed no statistically significant difference in complete abortion rates between self-assessment and routine clinic follow-up: RR= 1.00; 95% CI = 0.99 to 1.01 (high quality evidence). The point estimates for the pooled safety measures were: need for surgery (RR= 0.92; 95% CI = 0.7 to 1.21), occurrence of haemorrhage (RR= 1.48; 95% CI = 0.84 to 2.60), occurrence of fever and infection (RR= 0.41; 95% CI = 0.08 to 2.12), and drug administration for haemorrhage (RR= 1.81; 95% CI = 0.61 to 5.35). There were no statistically significant differences between the groups with respect to safety of the assessment technique (moderate to low quality evidence). The results showed that the preference of follow-up method is significantly greater for self-assessment compared to routine clinic follow-up. Overall, these results show that self-assessment at home is as safe as routine clinic follow-up.

Author’s Conclusions: This systematic review summarizes and presents that there is high quality evidence that the effectiveness of self-assessment of the outcome of medical abortion at home is not inferior to routine clinic follow-up. Further, it shows that self-assessment with telephone or home follow-up is safe and acceptable compared to routine clinic follow-up. This intervention is feasible to implement. Therefore, it can be incorporated as an alternative to abortion services in both low and high resource settings, giving women a choice whether to do the assessment by themselves or in clinics.