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Updated: Feb 25, 2026

Author Spotlight: Enhancing Success of Ultrasound-Guided Neuraxial Anesthesia in Cases with Difficult Anatomy
Published on: January 31, 2025
Modern Neuraxial Anesthesia for Labor and Delivery
Marie-Louise Meng1, Richard Smiley1
1Department of Anesthesiology, Columbia University Medical Center, New York, NY, USA.
Abstract:
The availability of safe, effective analgesia during labor has become an expectation for women in most of the developed world over the past two or three decades. More than 60% of women in the United States now receive some kind of neuraxial procedure during labor. This article is a brief review of the advantages and techniques of neuraxial labor analgesia along with the recent advances and controversies in the field of labor analgesia. For the most part, we have aimed the discussion at the non-anesthesiologist to give other practitioners a sense of the state of the art and science of labor analgesia in the second decade of the 21st century.
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