Prevalence and patterns of birth defects among newborns in southwestern Ethiopia: a retrospective study

Abstract

Introduction: prenatal development could be considered normal or abnormal. Abnormal development occurs because of interference of normal development from genetic disorders, environmental factors, and multifactorial inheritances during the critical period of embryogenesis. The present study was aimed at evaluating the prevalence and patterns of birth defects among newborns in southwestern Ethiopia.

Methods: institutions-based cross-sectional study design was conducted in six purposively selected hospitals in southwestern Ethiopia based on their caseload. The study included data's from 2011 to 2015, during which 45,951 deliveries were recorded. All records of births in the selected hospitals were screened from medical records to identify the presence and types of birth defects.

Results: out of twenty-one different birth defects identified, nearly half of them belong to anencephaly and hydrocephalus. Five types of birth defects, namely: anencephaly (25.0%), hydrocephalus (24.6%), spina bifida (13.1%), meningomyelocele (7.1%), and umbilical hernia (4.8%) accounted for about three-fourths (75%) of all recorded birth defects. The prevalence rate of birth defects at birth was 55 per 10,000 births.

Conclusion: in the present study, the neural tube defects were identified to be the most prevalent. Nearly equal proportions of birth defects occurred among male and female newborns. The majority of the mothers who gave birth to newborns with birth defects were younger than 35 years. The high prevalence of birth defects revealed in this study call for the need to implement urgent prevention strategies including but not limited to the provision of sustained family planning, youth education and antenatal care services, and strict observation of rational medication use during pregnancy to curb the possible occurrences of the birth defect.