Chloroprocaine Lavage to Improve Outcomes Related to Operative Cesarean Delivery

Compared to general anesthesia, neuraxial anesthesia (spinals and epidurals) is associated with a lower risk for maternal aspiration and airway compromise, exposes the baby to less anesthetic, and allows for greater maternal involvement in the birth process. For these reasons, it has become the preferred method of anesthesia for cesarean delivery. Spinals that are placed to facilitate cesarean delivery have a duration of one to two hours. Currently, if that duration is exceeded patients must have general endotracheal anesthesia. In addition, suboptimal neuraxial anesthesia for cesarean delivery is not uncommon with an incidence of 2-9%, depending upon the urgency of surgery and the type of neuraxial block. Providing less than adequate anesthesia for cesarean delivery may increase the risk of legal liability. For this reason, some patients with suboptimal neuraxial anesthesia have intraoperative conversion to general endotracheal anesthesia.

The first known description of the use of intraperitoneal local anesthetic to provide anesthesia for cesarean delivery was published in 1975. In this article Ranney et al. described how to use up to 100 mL of 1% procaine to provide anesthesia for cesarean delivery under local field block alone. Some of this was injected into the skin and fascia, and the remainder was diluted to 0.5% and "spilled" into the peritoneum.

Multiple publications have shown that intraperitoneal local anesthetic can be used to treat intraoperative and postoperative pain, prevent postoperative nausea, and shorten hospital length of stay. A recently published 40-month case series showed that chloroprocaine lavage can be used as part of a multimodal approach to treating intraoperative pain. In this case series, the technique of chloroprocaine lavage helped investigators to avoid general endotracheal anesthesia in 32 women having a cesarean delivery.

In this case series, no patients exhibited clinical signs of systemic local anesthetic toxicity. It is believed that chloroprocaine has a limited potential for toxicity because of its short plasma half-life, which is only 11-21 seconds. The purpose of this study is to determine the amount of chloroprocaine that is taken up into the blood stream after intraperitoneal administration to ensure that blood levels are low and do not raise a safety concern. Data obtained from this study will help to define a safe dose of chloroprocaine for intraperitoneal administration.