Epidurals make longer labors, study finds

Researchers found some women who received epidural anesthesia during labor took more than two hours longer to deliver their child, compared to women who didn't get the pain reliever, Fox News reports.

Cesarean sections, or c-sections, are now used for about one of every three births in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That's about 50 percent more than in the mid-1990s.

C-sections come with longer hospital stays and extra risks for mothers and babies.

Dr. Yvonne Cheng, the study's lead author and a specialist in maternal-fetal medicine at the University of California, San Francisco and her colleagues write in Obstetrics and Gynecology that two common reasons for performing c-sections are that it appears labor has slowed and that the baby is not progressing through the birth canal.

For the new study, they compared data from over 42,000 women who delivered their children at the University of California, San Francisco between 1976 and 2008. About half of the women received epidural anesthesia and the other half did not.

The researchers found the labor took about two hours longer when women got an epidural.

Dr. Karin Fox, a specialist in maternal-fetal medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children's Hospital in Houston, who was not involved with the study, said women shouldn't stay away from epidural anesthesia just because it will prolong labor. "There are many reasons for having an epidural," she said.

Dr. Christopher Glantz cautioned that although the health of babies in the epidural and non-epidural groups was similar, mothers tended to have more complications if they had longer labors.

Glantz was not involved with the study but is a high-risk pregnancy specialist at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York.

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