LABOUR PAIN RELIEF. THE MODERN APPROACH

Abstract

Women have an intense pain in the labor. Amount of pain varies greatly and it depends on the emotional, mental, physical status of women and environmental factors. The pain is caused by various physiological factors and triggers a cascade of biochemical reactions in the woman’s body. Intense pain brings suffering to women and can do damage to the fetus. Effective and safe anesthesia delivery is extremely important task for modern medicine. The article describes the essence of the most popular methods of pain relief during labor, discussed their positive and negative properties. Search literature for the review of various special medical and general Internet search engines. There are medication and non-medication methods of pain relief in labor. Non-medication method is non-invasive and healthier for a maternity patient and a child but their effectiveness is disputable. Medication methods of pain relief are presented injection of opioid analgesics and non-opioid analgesics, inhalation and neuroaxial anesthesia methods. Every method has advantages and disadvantages. Opioid analgesics reduce the pain for a few hours however cause a large number of undesirable effects such as nauseaand sleepiness of maternity patient, respiratory distress and depression of consciousness of newborn. Study of non-opioid analgesics showed a high analgesic activity but it was not study enough to use for pain relief in labor. Today the most common method is neuroaxial analgesia. It relieves the pain effectively and has no effect on the fetus but it has some disadvantages.The question of the influence of the neuroaxial methods of anesthesia on the duration of the labor is controversial. Promising is the use of inhaled anesthetics in particular xenon. But these methods are not study enough. All currently used labor pain relief methods are not ideal as far as each method has its own characteristics and bad effects. In each particular case the method of labor pain relief must be selected individually, it’s necessary to take into consideration the psychological and physical condition of the woman and obstetric situation.