Prevalence of Congenital Heart Defects in Individuals With Down Syndrome in Saudi Arabia: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Patients with Down syndrome (DS) are commonly diagnosed with congenital heart disease (CHD), which is the leading cause of mortality in this group during the first two years of life. This systematic review and meta-analysis aims to review the current publications to assess the pooled prevalence of overall CHDs in individuals with DS in KSA. We conducted the search on the databases PubMed, EBSCO, Scopus, Web of Science through Clarivate, and Google Scholar using Boolean operators and various keywords. The Rayyan - Intelligent Systematic Reviews website (https://www.rayyan.ai/) was used for citation management and MedCalc® Statistical Software version 20.115 was used for the quantitative data synthesis (MedCalc Software Ltd., 2022, Ostend Belgium). We initially retrieved a total of 402 citations from the primary search and 10 articles were finally included after title screening and full-text assessment. A total of 1590 subjects were enrolled in the pooled analyses. The pooled prevalence of CHDs was found to be 66.1% (95% CI: 57.2% to 74.5%). There was significant heterogeneity (I2 = 92.2%), and inspection of the funnel plot shows the symmetrical distribution of plotted data. According to our study, 66% of DS patients in Saudi Arabia had one or more congenital cardiac defects. Due to the significant inter-study heterogeneity, the reliability of our results is, nevertheless, limited. We advise conducting more research to provide better data for determining the prevalence of CHD.