Mortality and injuries among Iranians in Iraq-Iran war: a systematic review

The Iraq-Iran war was one of the longest conflicts in the twentieth century. The aim of our research was to review the incidence of mortality and injuries of the war.

A search strategy was designed and run in Medline, EMBASE, Scopus, and Iranian databases including Scientific Information Database (SID), IranMedex, and Magiran. Also, searching grey literature, checking references, tracking citations, hand-searching of focused journals, and websites were utilized for retrieval of related studies. All of articles which studied epidemiology of mortality or injuries of the war were included. The excluding criteria were case reports, case series, laboratory researches, and nonoriginal studies.

Fourteen articles out of 1751 primary results were selected to be included in the study. During the war (1980 - 1988), 188,015 to 217,489 Iranians were killed (about 70 people per day). The mean age of mortality was 23 years. Six thousand four hundred twenty-seven (2.9%) of those who died during the war were females. One thousand five chemical warfare victims died between 1983 and 1994. From 1985 through 1998, 82 veterans had successful suicides too. At the end of war, we had 398, 587 veterans who needed follow- up. Among them, there were 52,000 chemical warfare victims. Between 1988 and 2003, 1400 people died and 2313 injured due to landmines and unexploded ordnances in five border provinces.

The war caused a lot of mortalities and morbidities in our country. Now, 24 years after the war, many physically, mentally, and chemically injured victims have remained. We suggest other studies about indirect impacts of the war on societies, families, friends, and affiliates of the victims.