OFFICIAL STATISTICS: Congenital Anomaly Register and Information Service for Wales Annual Statistics Data Published

The 2022 annual data update from the Congenital Anomaly Register and Information Service (CARIS) for Wales has been published by Public Health Wales.

Story: The 2022 annual data update from the Congenital Anomaly Register and Information Service (CARIS) for Wales has been published by Public Health Wales.

The data update are delivered in three tables, and include:

• congenital anomaly data

• childhood rare diseases data

• antenatal detection rates.

Of all births in Wales, 4.9 per cent were affected by a congenital anomaly.  This proportion is slightly lower than the 5.1 per cent reported in the 2018 data, and it is expected that data collection may have been impacted by the Coronavirus pandemic.  For example, some routine surgeries may have been postponed and data reporting were therefore delayed via this route.

85 per cent of babies affected by a congenital anomaly were liveborn, with 96.6 per cent of these surviving to one year of age. Of those with a recorded gender, 59 per cent were male. These proportions remain similar to those reported at the 2018 update.

The prevalence rates of congenital anomalies by local authority region remains largely unchanged from previous years reports.

Counts and prevalence data are reported for over 260 different rare diseases and are categorised according to aetiology, or cause. For example, the most commonly reported genetic condition was Cystic fibrosis with 310 reported cases equating to a prevalence of 3.96 per 10,000 live births.

These statistics are produced as a combined effort by the CARIS and the Observatory and Cancer Analytical Team (OCAT). In addition to the headline summaries provided above, the data tables and outputs that form the official statistics release are available here: Annual Review & Data Tables.

Other research carried out by the CARIS team

Ten-Year Survival of Children With Congenital Anomalies: A European Cohort Study | Pediatrics | American Academy of Pediatrics (aap.org)

Behçet’s disease in Wales: an epidemiological description of national surveillance data | Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases | Full Text (biomedcentral.com)

A full list of CARIS presentations can be found on the CARIS website, along with further analysis and insight.

The CARIS Annual Meeting 2022 will be held virtually on Tuesday 15 November (12.00 – 14.00).

If you would like to attend, please email caris@wales.nhs.uk for the link.