Burn Epidemiology in Iran: A Meta-Analysis Study

Introduction & Severe burn is an important issue affecting public health in developing countries and one of the leading causes of death in Iran. In order to provide an overview on burn epidemiology in this country, we conducted a systematic review.
Various published articles on risk factors and prevalence of burn in Iran have been searched through different databases such as SID, Pubmed, Google Scholar, Medline and Scopous. Results were collected and statistically analyzed by software.
We investigated 76 studies from different parts of the country. Reports showed us almost 50% of patients were less than 16 years and 60% of them were men. Flames, boiling water, burn and contact with hot objects were among the most common causes. Death is exceedingly frequent in burn (1 to 67%). About one- third of patients were children up to 5 years. Intentional burns occurred mostly among women with high mortality rate.
Burn injuries still remain as an important public issue. Therefore, conducting more research to investigate the problem and evaluate the effectiveness of factors especially in prevention and early treatment methods is required. The prevalence of burn, mortality and the disability caused by it are high in our country. Therefore more detailed epidemiological studies with similar methods are needed in all over the country in order to reach to highly accurate statistics.