Between 2007 and 2010 the CORONIS trial recruited almost 16,000 women in Argentina, Chile, Ghana, India, Kenya, Pakistan and Sudan to compare different caesarean section techniques. Over 13,000 participants were followed up during 2011-14 to investigate longer term outcomes including pelvic pain, pain during sexual intercourse, hysterectomy and outcomes of subsequent pregnancies.
The results of the CORONIS follow-up study, published in the Lancet, indicate no evidence of a difference in the risk of any outcomes for the five intervention pairs. Overall, severe adverse outcomes were uncommon in these settings, limiting the power of the study to detect differences.
Since the study provides no evidence to favour one technique over another, other considerations, such as time and cost savings of the different approaches, can be used to determine clinical practice. Read the paper and associated commentary.