Frequency of congenital birth defects in newborn babies born at Hyderabad, Sindh.

Abstract

Objectives: This study has been conducted in a tertiary care hospital to observe the frequency of congenital birth defects in newborn babies born at, Hyderabad, Sindh. Study Design: Prospective observation study. Setting: The Departments of Obstetrics and Pediatrics, Isra University Hospital, Hyderabad. Period: Two years from 2016 to 2018. Material & Methods: All the pregnant women irrespective of their parity and were included in the study after getting informed and written consent from their family heads and after the approval from Hospital’s ethical committee. We have used SPSS version 21.0 software for both data entering and analysis. All the continuous variables were analyzed using student t test and categorical variables were analyzed using chi-square test. P-value of ≤0.05 was taken as statistically significant. Results: A total of 150 pregnant women were included in our study with their mean age and SD was 26.72 ± 7.07 years and the mean years of marriage were 5.95±6 years. Most of the women were multiparous (47%), as compared to nulliparous and grandmultiparous, 33% and 20%, respectively. The prevalence of congenital birth defect was 11.3%, of these 30% had CNS malformations followed by 30% with gastrointestinal, 24% musculoskeletal, 12% genitourinary and 4% had ear malformations. Conclusion: The interfamily marriages (consanguineous marriages) are more common than outside family in study population. The frequency of birth defects was more than i-e: twice higher in interfamily marriages than outside family marriages.