Neonatal outcome among pregnant women with COVID-19: a systematic review and meta-analysis

COVID-19 has raised many concerns about the possible side effects of pregnancy. There is currently no conclusive evidence of the vertical transmission of COVID-19. Accordingly, this paper is a Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis investigated neonatal outcomes among pregnant women with COVID-19.

PubMed, Web of Science (WoS), EMBASE, ProQuest, Scopus, and Google Scholar were searched up to November 2020. The Cochran's Q-test and I² statistic were applied to assess heterogeneity, a random-effects model was used to estimate the pooled estimate of the mean, and a meta-regression method was utilized to investigate the factors affecting heterogeneity between studies.

Of 1132 studies, 23 were included in the analysis (sample size: 749 for neonates and 820 for mothers). Most of these studies (n = 13) were conducted in China. The pooled estimate for the mean of birth weight, APGAR score in min 1 and 5 was 3084.97 g (95% CI: 2993.66-3176.29), 8.76 (95% CI: 8.27-9.25), and 9.44 (95% CI: 9.18-9.70), respectively. Also, the pooled prevalence of premature birth, shortness of breath, and neonatal death was 17.80% (95% CI: 12.47-23.13), 8.43% (95% CI: 4.50-12.37), and 7.73% (95% CI: 2.00-13.47), respectively. The meta-regression results indicated that the mother's age, disease duration, and sample size had no significant effect on heterogeneity between studies (p-value all of them was >.05). Finally, 15 studies (65.22%) reported that vertical transmission did not occur.

The COVID-19 infection can have adverse outcomes for the newborn. Despite the positive test of neonates, the vertical transmission of COVID-19 from the infected mother to the fetus has not yet been conclusively proven; thus, further research is needed.