Maternal Inactive Hepatitis B Status and Birth-Outcomes: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Context: Hepatitis is a term used to describe any type of hepatitis inflammation. Screening for the virus antigen during pregnancy is mandatory in some parts of the world and is recommended in others. so that, most women are aware of and understand the disease if they have it when they are pregnant. Thus, the major concerns of these women are both the virus transmission to the fetus and the effects of hepatitis B on pregnancy outcome.
Evidence Acquisition: According to a specific protocol, we searched in the Pub med, Scopus, ISI web of science from 1990 to February 2015 to find the original articles, which investigated the hepatitis B effects in pregnant women with normal singleton pregnancy who were previously diagnosed with inactive CHB or were incidentally found to be HBsAg positive in routine antenatal blood test. We included any cohort, case control and cross sectional studies if they had a healthy control group and reported one or more considered maternal or prinatal outcomes in pregnant women. Meta-analysis was performed with Review manager 5.4 and Stata 11 software. We assessed the effect size that was pooled odds ratio (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) using the random effects model. We explored statistical heterogeneity using the chi-squared (Chi2), I2 and tau-squared (Tau2) statistical tests.
From a total of 156 identified studies, 56 studies were chosen for a detailed review, and 18 studies which met the inclusion and exclusion criteria were included in the meta analysis. Among the included studies, the outcomes were small for gestational age (SGA) large for gestational age (LGA), intra uterine growth restriction (IUGR), fetal distress, fifth minutes apgar score, first minute Apgar score, low birth weight (LBW) and Fetal Macrosomia.
In this study, hepatitis B had a cause effect on LGA and fetal Macrosomia. Among the other considered adverse pregnancy outcomes; it didn’t have any significant effect.