الفهرس 
IntroductionOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
 |  | from | 111 |  |  |
| | | from | 111 | | |
Abstract
For many years, epidural and caudal analgesia have been considered the gold-standard techniques after abdominal sur-gery for adults and children, respectively. The techniques con-sist of injecting the local anesthetic within the epidural space, between the ligamentumflavum and the dura mater. Depending on the surgical site and the level of injection, cervical, thoracic, or lumbar nerve roots are blocked after their emergence from the neural foramen. Epidural and caudal analgesia have some drawbacks including hypotension secondary to the sympa-thetic blockade by the local anesthetic.
In the last decade, a new abdominal truncal block, called the tranversusabdominis plane (TAP) block, was described consisting of local anesthetic injection between the internal oblique and transversusabdominis muscle. This block provides analgesia by blocking the 7th to 11th intercostal nerves (T7–T11), the subcostal nerve (T12), and the ilioinguinal nerve and iliohypogastric nerve (L1–L2).
This study was conducted to compare the effectiveness and safety of US guided TAP block to epidural block as a good analgesia for patients undergoing lower abdominal surgery. The study was conducted on 60 randomly chosen patients in Ain Shams University Hospitals after approval of the medical ethical committee. Patients were divided randomly into two groups, each group consisted of 30 patients.
All patients received general anesthesia. Epidural an-esthesia group received epidural anesthesia while TAP block group received bilateral TAP block. The two groups were ade-quately monitored and assessed intraoperatively and postoper-atively for 12 hours and were compared regarding demograph-ic data ,intraoperative and postoperative hemodynamics , postoperative pain control using Visual Analogue Score and complications of both anesthetic techniques .
The results of the study revealed that epidural block pro-vided significantly prolonged postoperative analgesia and re-duced postoperative analgesic requirements as compared to ultrasound guided TAP block in patients undergoing lower ab-dominal surgery. Both analgesic techniques are safe.