Anesthesia for Cesarean Section

Cesarean section is frequently becoming a popular mode of child delivery world-wide. The rate of Cesarean section could be as high as 18/100 in Africa (Aisien et al, 2002) to 32/100 deliveries in the United States (Declercq et al, 2011). The use of anesthesia makes a Cesarean delivery possible. Various forms of anesthesia have been used to perform this surgery. However, the use of general anesthesia has fallen dramatically in the past few decades and now accounts for only about 5 percent of Cesarean deliveries in the United States and United Kingdom. In the sub-saharan Africa, 80 -90% of the Cesarean sections are performed under spinal anesthesia (Fyneface-Ogan et al, 2005). Although spinal analgesia is now the mainstay of anesthesia in countries like India and parts of Africa, excluding the major centres, current usage of this technique is waning in the developed world, with epidural analgesia or combined spinal-epidural anesthesia emerging as the techniques of choice where the cost of the disposable 'kit' is not a challenge.