Anesthesia efficacy of bupivacaine in pregnant participants with breech presentation receiving external cephalic version: A protocol of systematic review of randomized controlled trials

BACKGROUND: The objective of this study is to appraise the efficacy and safety of bupivacaine in pregnant participants with breech presentation (BP) receiving external cephalic version (ECV). METHODS: The following electronic databases will be searched from the origin to the January 31, 2020: PUBMED, EMBASE, Cochrane Library, CINAHL, ACMD, PsycINFO, Scopus, OpenGrey, and China National Knowledge Infrastructure. No language and publication time limitations will be applied to all of them. Randomized controlled trials comparing bupivacaine to other interventions for pain relief in pregnant participants with BP undergoing ECV will be included in this study. Two authors will employ the selection of searched records, extraction of essential data from included RCTs, and risk of bias assessment for each eligible trail independently and respectively. Any doubts between 2 authors will be figured out by a third author through discussion. The risk of bias assessment will be judged using Cochrane risk of bias tool. The data pooling and analysis will be performed using RevMan 5.3 software. RESULTS: This study will summarize the up-to-date high-quality evidence and will synthesis the outcome data from that evidence to explore the efficacy and safety of bupivacaine for pain relief in pregnant participants with BP undergoing ECV. CONCLUSION: The findings of this study may present important guidance for patients, clinical practice, as well as health-policy makers regarding the utilization of bupivacaine for pain relief in pregnant participants with BP receiving ECV. SYSTEMATIC REVIEW REGISTRATION: PROSPERO CRD42020164409.