Interventions for heartburn in pregnancy.

Study answer

What this study found

Overall, evidence was limited and too sparse to identify the best intervention for heartburn in pregnancy. Pharmaceutical treatments may provide complete relief of heartburn compared with placebo or no treatment, but the evidence base was small and much of it could not be pooled because of missing data or inconsistent outcome reporting. In individual active arms, complete relief was reported in 17/50 with prostigmine, 58/83 with magnesium and aluminium hydroxide plus simethicone, and 37/41 with sucralfate; side effects were uncommon in these reported arms (0/50, 5/83, and 1/42,…

Study & population

Systematic review of nine small randomized trials in pregnant women with heartburn, conducted in the United Kingdom, United States, Australia, Germany, Italy, and Brazil.

Intervention

Included active interventions were a range of medications and complementary therapy for heartburn in pregnancy, including prostigmine 0.5 mg intramuscular single dose, magnesium and aluminium hydroxide plus simethicone, mucaine with or without oxethazaine, Syn-ergel, algicon suspension 10 mL, magnesium trisilicate…

Key limitation

No large-scale randomized trials were available, and most included studies were small.

View full study detailsView sourceOpen PDF

Original abstract