Anaesthetic morbidity following caesarean section under epidural or general anaesthesia.

To find out whether morbidity in the first postoperative week is affected by type of anaesthetic technique, healthy patients who had caesarean sections under epidural anaesthesia were compared with those who were given a general anaesthetic. Epidural anaesthesia was associated with less pain (p less than 0.00001) and discomfort in the immediate postoperative period. By the second day fewer epidural patients had gastrointestinal stasis, pyrexia (p less than 0.05), and coughing (p less than 0.00001). Breastfeeding and mobilisation started earlier. Fewer mothers were coughing (p less than 0.005), had fever (p less than 0.01), or felt tired and depressed (p less than 0.005) by the sixth postoperative day after epidural caesarean section. The epidemiology of anaesthetic morbidity needs to be assessed in other surgical patients.