Congenital Anomalies among Delivered and Admitted Neonates in Harari Regional State Hospitals, Harar, Eastern Ethiopia, 2017: A Retrospective Cross-Sectional Study

Background: Worldwide, congenital anomalies are the common problems that can occur at a rate of 3-6% of all births or 1 in every 33 babies born with the incidence of 11.87 per 1000 live births Thus, the aim of this study was to assess the prevalence of congenital anomalies among delivered and admitted neonates in Harari regional state Hospitals.

Methods: An institutional based retrospective cross-sectional study was employed to assess the prevalence of congenital anomalies among 7,255 admitted and delivered neonates in selected Harari regional Hospitals from December 18 to January 3, 2017. Three Hospitals were selected by simple random sampling method. All the cards recorded from July 2016 to June 2017 were reviewed. Trained six data collectors and 3 supervisors were recruited. The collected data was cleaned and checked for consistency. Then entered into Epi-Data v3.5 and exported to SPSS v25 for analysis.

Results: In this study, a total of 6197 babies (3248 males and 2949 females) were delivered in Hiwot Fana Specialized University hospital (HFSUH), Jugol and Harar General Hospital. From these, 45 (0.73%) babies were developed congenital anomalies. Among them, 28 (0.45%) & 17 (0.28%) were males and females respectively. On the other hand, 1058 (671 male and 387 female) babies were admitted to HFSUH and Jugol Hospital. Among the total, 30 (2.84%) admitted with congenital anomalies.

Overall, in this study, 7,255 neonates were delivered and admitted in the three selected Hospitals from July 2016 to June 2017. From these, 75 (48 males & 27 females) of them had congenital anomalies that gave the prevalence of 1.03% (0.66% males and 0.37% females).

Conclusions: A collaborative effort is needed to tackle the problem, by regular antenatal follow-up, early prenatal diagnosis, and intervention and even planned termination and appropriate treatment after birth.