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Zika-associated birth defects jump 20-fold since outbreak in Americas

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The fraction of pregnancies resulting in certain birth defects in the United States has increased from nearly three per 1,000 to about 60 per 1,000 births since the Zika virus came to the Americas, the CDC estimates.

The jump in defects from 2013 and 2014 to last year was reported in a study published in the CDC’s MMWR and coincides with the Zika outbreak in Brazil that subsequently spread to the U.S.

“Data on birth defects in the pre-Zika years serve as benchmarks to direct rapid ascertainment and reporting of birth defects potentially related to Zika virus infection,” the study researchers wrote.

“The higher proportion of these defects among pregnancies with laboratory evidence of possible Zika virus infection supports the relationship between congenital Zika virus infection and birth defects.”

The researchers examined birth defect data from 2013 and 2014 recorded at three surveillance programs, located in Massachusetts, North Carolina and Georgia.  From that set, they chose 747 infants and fetuses with defects that met the CDC’s 2016 definition of those potentially related to Zika.

The defects included brain abnormalities and/or microcephaly, central nervous system abnormalities, several types of early brain malformation and eye problems.

The most common defects were brain abnormalities and/or microcephaly, which occurred in 52.5% of cases (n = 392), followed by neural tube defects and other early brain malformations at 30.7% (n = 229). Altogether, the researchers found that 2.86 births per 1,000 in the country resulted in Zika-associated defects for those years.

They compared the data with that of a study previously published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, in which researchers analyzed 442 births given by women with laboratory evidence of Zika infection. Those births took place between January and September of 2016, and the data were collected by the U.S. Zika Pregnancy Registry (USZPR).

Twenty-six of the births resulted in Zika-associated defects and translated to 58.8 per 1,000 in the country.

The researchers highlighted the importance of comparing the two different data sets in detecting the potential impact of Zika on congenital problems.

“These data demonstrate the critical contribution of population-based birth defects surveillance to understanding the impact of Zika virus infection during pregnancy,” they wrote. – by Joe Green

References:

Cragan JD, et al. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep. 2017/66(8);219-222

Honein MA, et al. JAMA. 2017;doi:10.1001/jama.2016.19006.

Disclosure: The researchers report no relevant financial disclosures.