Obstetric and psychological characteristics of women choosing epidural analgesia during labour: A cohort study

Vasilis Sitras, Jūratė Šaltytė Benth and Malin Eberhard-Gran

PLOS ONE, 2017, vol. 12, issue 10, 1-10

Abstract: Objectives: To investigate the obstetric and psychological characteristics of women who opt to use epidural analgesia (EDA) during labour and the impact of participating in labour preparation courses on women’s decisions to use EDA. Design: Longitudinal cohort study. Setting: Akershus University Hospital, Norway. Population: 2596 women with singleton pregnancies and intended vaginal delivery. Methods: Data were collected using two self-completed questionnaires at pregnancy weeks 17 and 32. Fear of childbirth was assessed by the Wijma Delivery Expectancy Questionnaire (W-DEQ). Symptoms of anxiety were measured by the Hopkins Symptom Check List (SCL-25) and depression by the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS). Obstetric and socio-demographic information was retrieved from birth records at the maternity ward. Main outcome measure: Preference for EDA was indicated by the questionnaire item “I would prefer an epidural regardless” on a 4-point scale (1 = highly agree, 4 = highly disagree) at pregnancy week 32. Results: Twenty-one percent of the women (540/2596) answered that they would choose EDA as the only alternative method of analgesia during labour. Counselling for fear of childbirth [OR 3.23 (95%CI 2.12; 4.92)] and W-DEQ sum score ≥ 85 [OR 2.95 (95%CI 2.06; 4.23)] were significantly (p

Date: 2017
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0186564 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 86564&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0186564

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0186564

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().