Child injury mortality in Iran: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Reducing child injury mortality is an important factor in directing national and international policy-makers to program appropriate cause-specific interventions. The systematic review and meta-analysis study was performed to provide a clear view of child injury mortality in Iran. A systematic electronic search of PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, SID, and Elmnet was performed to identify the Persian and English articles published between 2005 and 2018. All studies reporting child injury mortality were gathered according to our inclusion and exclusion criteria. After quality appraisal, data were extracted and analyzed. Twelve studies with an overall sample size of 22,721 met our inclusion criteria. The prevalence of mortality due to road accident, falling, drowning, poisoning and other causes of death were 56.8%, 11.3%, 8.6%, 5.7% and, 17.6%, respectively. The proportion of injury in all-cause mortality in 0–19 and 0–6 age groups were 11.9% and 16.9%, respectively. Our findings suggest a relatively high mortality rate for road traffic accidents, which should be taken into account seriously. Developing preventive policies is essential to achieve better standards of road transportation and reduce related mortality in Iran. •Highest prevalence of Child injury mortality belong to road accident in Iran.•Road accident consist of half of child injury mortality rate in Iran.•Falling, drowning, and poisoning are in the following order, respectively.