The Epidural anesthesia, baptized by many mothers as "blessed epidural" and many others as "better without you" takes a long time with us, making women give birth with hardly any pain, but in a different way to the natural and, therefore so much, with more contraindications, side effects and, it is said, even with a worse taste in the mouth when comparing it with deliveries without epidural.
It is known that the epidural causes the births to slow down, that the dilation slows down and, on average, the baby takes about an hour more to leave. However, a new study seems to prove no, that in reality births are lengthened even more and that many caesarean sections for "stagnant deliveries" could be avoided by taking this into account.
Study Data
The study I am talking about was published recently and was aimed at comparing the time it took for women to give birth when they did not receive epidural anesthesia, as well as knowing what the difference was when it was administered.
To make the study, the stories of 42,268 women who gave birth through vaginal delivery in San Francisco between 1976 and 2008. To analyze the births, they observed those that were part of the average time (the average between those who gave birth faster and those that took longer) and those that happened in the 95th percentile (those that they gave birth later, at the time when most had already had their baby).
They observed that those who had received epidural anesthesia in the 95th percentile of the second phase of labor (active dilation) and had not previously had children gave birth in 336 minutes, while those who had not received it did so in 197 minutes on average The difference between the two is 2 hours and 19 minutes.
If they compared women who had already been mothers, also speaking of those located in the 95th percentile (those that take longer to give birth) the second phase of labor lasted 81 minutes without epidural and 255 minutes with it, the difference being much more remarkable to be 2 hours and 54 minutes, making the active dilation phase three times longer.
And the caesarean sections for detained deliveries?
The authors of the study quickly realized that, if professionals rely on waiting for an hour to determine that a delivery is stagnant, an hour with respect to what a normal birth without epidural would last, and then begin to assess whether Doing a caesarean section or not, it could be soon. That is, knowing that in reality the epidural can cause a delivery to slow down in up to two hours, the logical thing would be wait longer before saying a birth is stopping.
Yvonne Cheng, author of the study explains it this way:
The effect of the epidural can be prolonged longer than previously thought and as long as the baby and the mother are well and any progress without complications we would not have to intervene (and do a C-section) as a function of time.
Triple the time?
On the other hand, leaving aside the issue of caesarean sections that could be avoided, I think it is worth influencing the length of time a woman who has already given birth can reach. Without epidural anesthesia, the ones that take the longest to dilate do so in one hour and twenty minutes, while with epidural they go more than four hours. I think it is worth assessing a moment (or a long moment) the possibility of giving birth without using this anesthesia. Not only the baby will be born before, much earlier, is that in addition the recovery is better, breastfeeding is established before and there is, in general, less complications.
