Child birth is associated with severely painful experience for the parturient, and often exceeds one’s expectations. Even though, severe pain is non life-threatening condition in healthy parturient women, it may lead to undesired neuropsychological consequences. When no analgesia was used, postnatal depression may be more common, and this labour pain leads to the development of post-traumatic stress disorder. Epidural analgesia is now considered gold standard for effective pain relief during labour. We here report a case of a 37-year-old G1 P0 patient at term gestation who successfully used epidural analgesia for labour pain management.
While past studies have detected heavy metals in aerosols emitted from electronic cigarettes (ECIG), they have provided little information detailing the practical implications of the findings to the Malaysian population due to variations between products. The aims of this study were to analyse heavy metals of interest (HMOI) in the aerosols emitted from selected ECIG and to evaluate potential health risks by referring to the permissible daily exposure (PDE) from inhalational medications defined by the United States Pharmacopeia Chapter 232. All four HMOI were detected in aerosols emitted from the selected ECIG in Sarawak. Among the four, Cr was present at the highest median levels (6.86 ng/m3), followed by Ni (0.30 ng/m3), Pb (0.19 ng/m3) and Cd (0.01 ng/m3). Five out of 100 combinations (5%) of ECIG and ECIG liquids were found to emit Cr that exceed the recommended PDE. Future studies examining more heavy metal variants, using a larger sample size and different analytical techniques to compare various ECIGs are recommended.