Combined spinal epidural labour analgesia: Complications and their management

Abstract

Combined spinal-epidural analgesia (CSEA) is an effective and increasingly popular analgesia method used in vaginal delivery. CSEA provides rapid and excellent analgesia, allows mobilization, reduces drug consumption significantly and generally causes negligible maternal and fetal /neonatal adverse effects /complications not requiring treatment. The resulting adverse effects /complications are often associated with technical and /or agent/agents used and cause maternal and fetal /neonatal or, albeit rarely, serious adverse effects. Therefore, these cases should be monitored closely during analgesia, necessary preventive measures should be taken by anticipating the potential problems and if necessary, appropriate medical intervention should be performed. 

Keywords

• Combined spinal-epidural analgesia
• Drug-related complications
• Labour analgesia
• Technique-related complications