The main strength of the study is the high quality of data on congenital anomalies from the Danish EUROCAT Register including also the most severe congenital anomalies leading to fetal death and terminations of pregnancy.
Specifically, birth defects account for almost 2% of live births, fetal deaths and termination of pregnancy for fetal anomaly following prenatal diagnosis.
For incidence density calculation, we calculated follow-up person-years for study subjects until CKD diagnosed, or until 31 December 2007 for those uncensored, or the censoring date for the censored for other reasons, such as death, emigration and termination of the insured program.
Most included live births, fetal deaths, and terminations.
The registry is a population-based, active surveillance system that has monitored births, fetal deaths, and terminations throughout the state since 1999.
Study question What are the long term trends in the total (live births, fetal deaths, and terminations of pregnancy for fetal anomaly) and live birth prevalence of neural tube defects (NTD) in Europe, where many countries have issued recommendations for folic acid supplementation but a policy for mandatory folic acid fortification of food does not exist?
Therefore, the prevalence of all congenital anomalies (including live births, fetal deaths, stillbirths, and termination of pregnancy) for Barcelona was lower, during 1994 2006, than the European register 184/10,000 and 233/10,000 respectively (EUROCAT 2012).
This category includes deaths where a congenital abnormality (structural, functional or chromosomal) is considered to have made a major contribution to the death and includes terminations of pregnancy for congenital abnormality.
"The Mesoamerican worldview was constantly in motion, in cycles of birth and death, termination and regeneration," anthropologists William Duncan and Charles Hofling wrote in a paper published in Ancient Mesoamerica in 2011.
