The Relationship Between Women’s Intention to Request a Labor Epidural Analgesia, Actually Delivering With Labor Epidural Analgesia, and Postpartum Depression at 6 Weeks: A Prospective Observational Study

Abstract

( Anesth Analg . 2018;126:1590–1597) At the Beilinson Campus of the Rabin Medical Center in Petach Tikva, Israel, a proportion of women who intend to deliver with labor epidural analgesia (LEA) are often unable to receive it due to a lack of available nursing staff, labor rooms, or anesthesiologists at the time of request. As there is no study to date that has specifically examined the relationship between birth plan, satisfaction with LEA, and development of postpartum depression (PPD), the authors of the present study examined the impact of delivering without analgesia when such was not the intended plan. They hypothesized that the PPD rate at 6 weeks would be highest among women who intended to deliver with LEA but who actually delivered without.