Treatment of Early Pregnancy Failure

The optimal method of treating Early Pregnancy Failure (EPF) is not certain. For many years, surgical management of EPF was the only treatment option. Now there are multiple studies demonstrating the effectiveness of misoprostol for treating EPF. Most of the studies investigating medical treatment of EPF have evaluated efficacy at one week. We have found that many women do not want to wait for one week for an outcome of their medical treatment, and want resolution sooner. This has hampered the widespread utilization of medical therapy in our institution.

We propose a regimen of medical treatment for EPF with expeditious follow-up. We want to demonstrate the relative efficacy of two medication regimens for treatment of EPF by performing a randomized trial. One regimen will be 800μg buccal misoprostol alone and the other regimen will be 200mg mifepristone, orally, in addition to 800μg buccal misoprostol, simultaneously. The primary outcome will be complete abortion rates 24hours after medication administration. We hypothesize that mifepristone will not improve complete abortion rates at 24hrs.

Secondary outcomes include rates of abortion by medical treatment at one week, the indications for surgical intervention, relationship of progesterone levels and type of pregnancy failure to outcomes in the two groups. Another secondary objective is to assess satisfaction with the treatment process at the conclusion of pregnancy termination, and 3 weeks after the beginning of the process.

The majority of studies investigating medical treatment of EPF use vaginal misoprostol, but buccal use is increasing. We will use buccal misoprostol, which is widely used at our institution. We will assess the efficacy of this route of administration as well as assess patient acceptability of this method.