Fetal Bradycardia After an Epidural

We see a fetal bradycardia just after an epidural has been cited. The traditional reason was very much because we do get a degree of sympathetic blockade within epidural which obviously causes a degree of vasodilatation and can drop the patient's blood pressure. For quite some time now we've been using what we call low concentration high volume epidurals meaning that we use low concentration local anesthetics and larger volumes of them. What this means is that we get less sympathetic blockade and in fact less motor blockade as well but also means that we get far less hypotension.