Limitations
In future research, we will not use prose for participant responses regarding pain duration. We recommend using only multiple choice lists.
The questionnaire we sourced for nine out of our ten history features of abdominal wall neuropathy was not generated for this purpose. It was written to help delineate between Irritable Bowel Syndrome and ACNES (9). It also does not describe the symptoms in terms of their specificity for ACNES, but rather the percentage of patients with ACNES using these descriptors.
There are other pain processes which pregnant people encounter which may have skewed our responses. Participants may have responded positively with descriptions of their pelvic girdle pain, symphysis pubis disfunction and uterine contractions. For this reason, any future studies on the subject should involve a Delphi method for questionnaire development and clinician-guided participant interviews.
Of clinical note, dysesthesia and allodynia are also features of central sensitisation, a complex pain syndrome involving amplification of pain by central nervous system mechanisms (21). It is advisable to ask patients if they suffer from chronic abdominal pain outside of pregnancy. The impact of central sensitisation on the therapeutic effect of a TAP block is as yet unknown.