Does regional anaesthetic cause urinary retention?

Now, the question is whether the use of spinals and epidurals is related to urinary retention. Urinary retention is a nasty medical phrase for difficulty passing urine after operations. The answer is they can be. There is a small association, but the association is largely with the local anesthetic drugs used that last a long time. time and certainly if you have a local anaesthetic that lasts two, three or four hours, the chances, more in men than in women, that you may have difficulty passing urine afterwards do exist. However, over the last three to five years we've started to use shorter and shorter acting local anaesthetics for these procedures that wear off after the surgery is finished but within a short space of time, within 45 minutes to an hour and a half or two hours. And what we've learned is if we use these short-acting drugs we don't give the patients too much intravenous fluid that the actual chances of suffering from urinary retention are really very low but because we're mindful of the risk of this happening what we tend to do is wait until you've successfully passed urine before letting you leave the hospital. Use of short-acting local anesthetics and understanding that we don't give you too much fluid, making sure that you pass urine successfully, all this means we should be lowering the incidence of urine retention and not having it as a problem going home for it happening and then you having to come back in. So the honest answer is yes it can happen, it happens a little bit more often than we give you a general anaesthetic but it's not much more often we know whom to whom it happens and we know what we can do about it to minimize it's it's happening and to treat it if it does happen.