Safety and complications of labour epidural analgesia in obese parturients: worrying is not worth the weight!

Abstract

The physiological transformations accompanying pregnancy, compounded by the implications of obesity, pose intricate challenges for anaesthesiologists attending to obese parturients. Obesity makes it harder to successfully provide epidural analgesia to a parturient. This narrative review explains the most recent data on the safety and complications of providing labour epidural analgesia in obese expectant mothers. We have emphasised the evidence-based approaches that are the most effective for obese pregnant mothers receiving labour epidural analgesia.

Keywords

• labor
• epidural
• obesity
• pregnancy
• analgesia