Comparison of the onset of uterine contractions determined from tocodynamometry and maternal perception

The aim of this study was to investigate the time difference (TD) between the onset of uterine contraction (UC) determined from tocodynamometry (TOCO) and identified by maternal perception. The online available Icelandic database was used to calculate TD, which was defined as the difference between when it was felt by a pregnant woman and the starting point on the UC signal recorded by a TOCO. A total of 295 TDs from 78 recordings (from a total of 33 participants; among them, 13 participants included at least 3 recordings from different gestational weeks) were analyzed with the overall mean±SD of TD calculated. For each individual participant with at least 3 recordings, regression analysis was then performed to investigate the relationship between the mean TD from each recording with gestational week, with their overall slope calculated. The results showed that 85.4% of TDs was within [−40, 40] s, with an overall mean TD of 3.04 s (p>0.05), indicating that there was no significant difference between the UC onset determined from TOCO and maternal perception. It was also noticed that 61.5% recordings (48 out of 78 recordings) had all positive or negative TD for all the UCs analyzed within a recording. Furthermore, the regression analysis showed that the regression line slope was negative for 10 out of the 13 participants with at least 3 recordings from different gestational weeks, resulting in that the overall slope (−2.85±5.58) was significantly negative (p<0.05), and indicating that UC onset TD decreased with gestational weeks. In summary, this study quantitatively investigated the TD between the onset of UCs determined from TOCO and maternal perception, providing scientific evidence for future studies to understand the underlying mechanism of the time sequence of UC activity determined from different techniques.