A new study suggested a woman who is in labor should be given an epidural exactly when they ask for it.
An epidural is a local anesthetic injected into the spine to ease the pain of childbirth, Wiley reported. Past studies have suggested the timing of an epidural could prolong labor and increase the chances of Caesarean section.
"The right time to give the epidural is when the woman requests pain relief," said lead researcher Dr. Ban Leong Sng, who is also the Deputy Head and Senior Consultant of the Department of Women's Anaesthesia, KK Women's and Children's Hospital (KKH), Singapore. "If they request an epidural early during their labour, the evidence we have does not provide a compelling reason why this should be refused."
To make their findings the researchers reviewed data from nine studies involving 15,752 first-time mothers who were randomly assigned to either get epidurals early on or later in labor; half of the women were given the injection when they were
The first group of women were given the epidural when they were less than five centimeters dilated while the other group received it when they were at four or five centimeters.
The team found women who got epidurals early on were at no greater risk of needing a Cesarean section than those who had later ones. The timing of the epidural also proved to have no effect on the need for assisted birth using tools such as forceps or suction.
"We can't rule out the possibility that starting epidural pain relief earlier may lead to shorter [labor]," Sng. "This is because there was a lot of variation in the results of the studies we looked at in terms of the length of the first stage of [labor]."'
The findings were published in a recent edition of The Cochrane Library.
