Weaknesses in the Reporting of Cross-sectional Studies in Accordance with the STROBE Report (The Case of Congenital Anomaly among Infants in Iran): A Review Article

Background: The inadequate reporting of cross-sectional studies, as in the case of the prevalence of Congeni-tal Anomaly, could cause challenges in the synthesis of new evidence and make possible mistakes in the crea-tion of public policies. This study was conducted to critically appraise the quality of the articles involving con-genital anomaly prevalence in Iranian infants with the STROBE recommendations. Methods: We performed a thorough literature search using the words "congenital anomaly" "birth defect" and "Ir@n" in MEDLINE/PubMed, Scopus, SID, Elmnet, Magiran, IranDoc, Iranmedex, and Google Scholar until Aug 2017. In this critical appraisal we focused on cross-sectional studies that reported the prevalence of congeni-tal anomaly in Iranian infants. Data were analyzed using the STROBE score per item and recommendation. Results: The results of 17 selected articles on Congenital Anomaly prevalence showed that the overall accord-ance of the cross-sectional study reports with STROBE recommendations was about 63%. All articles met the recommendations associated with the report of the study’s rationale, objectives, setting, key results and provi-sion of summary measures. Methods and results were the weakest part of the articles, in which recommenda-tions associated with the participant flowchart and missing data analysis were not reported. The recommenda-tions with the lowest scores were those related to the sensitivity analysis (6%, n=1/17), bias (6%, n=1/17), and funding (41%, n=7/17). Conclusion: Cross-sectional studies about the prevalence of congenital anomaly in Iranian infants have an insufficient reporting on the methods and results parts. We recognized a clear need to increase the quality of such studies.