Hypospadias Prevalence and Trends in International Birth Defect Surveillance Systems, 1980-2010

Hypospadias is a common male birth defect that has shown widespread variation in reported prevalence estimates. Many countries have reported increasing trends over recent decades.

To analyze the prevalence and trends of hypospadias for 27 international programs over a 31-yr period.

The study population included live births, stillbirths, and elective terminations of pregnancy diagnosed with hypospadias during 1980-2010 from 27 surveillance programs around the world.

We used joinpoint regression to analyze changes over time in international total prevalence of hypospadias across programs, prevalence for each specific program, and prevalence across different degrees of severity of hypospadias.

The international total prevalence of hypospadias for all years was 20.9 (95% confidence interval: 19.2-22.6) per 10000 births. The prevalence for each program ranged from 2.1 to 39.1 per 10000 births. The international total prevalence increased 1.6 times during the study period, by 0.25 cases per 10000 births per year (p<0.05). When analyzed separately, there were increasing trends for first-, second-, and third-degree hypospadias during the early 1990s to mid-2000s. The majority of programs (61.9%) had a significantly increasing trend during many of the years evaluated. Limitations include known differences in data collection methods across programs.

Although there have been changes in clinical practice and registry ascertainment over time in some countries, the consistency in the observed increasing trends across many programs and by degrees of severity suggests that the total prevalence of hypospadias may be increasing in many countries. This observation is contrary to some previous reports that suggested that the total prevalence of hypospadias was no longer increasing in recent decades.

We report on the prevalence and trends of hypospadias among 27 birth defect surveillance systems, which indicate that the prevalence of hypospadias continues to increase internationally.