Prevalence and Related Factors of Electrical Burns in Patients Referred to Iranian Medical Centers: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Electrical burn, one of the serious public health challenges, is considered one of the most devastating due to higher mortalities. Burn injuries impose a high economic burden on patients, the health system, and society. We aimed to determine the prevalence of electrical burn injury among burn patients hospitalized in Iran.

A systematic literature search was conducted to identify articles published from Iran in the electronic databases of Scopus, PubMed, Embase, Google Scholar, Web of Science, and SID from Jan 2000 to Dec 2020. Next, eight publications from international databases and ten articles from the Persian SID database that met our inclusion criteria were selected for data extraction and meta-analysis. The inclusion criteria were articles done among the Iranian population with burn patients.

In all studies, the pooled prevalence of electrical burn was estimated at 3.8% (95% CI: 3.1% – 4.5%) in burn patients. Occurrence of electrical burn-in males and females was 92.3% (95% CI: 87.9% – 95.2%) and 7.7% (95% CI: 4.8% – 12.1%) respectively. Also, the mortality rate was 3.5% (95% CI: 2.2% – 5.6%).

The epidemiological study of electrical burns helps determine the effective factors in the occurrence of this type of damage.