Birth Defects
For questions about this data, send email to birthdefects@dshs.texas.gov or call (512) 776-7232
Data Sources
Texas Birth Defects Registry (TBDR), Birth Defects Epidemiology and Surveillance (BDES) Branch,Data Description
Birth defects data in Texas are collected by the Texas Birth Defects Registry via active surveillance. The data presented in these visualizations include selected birth defects among infants/fetuses delivered from 1999 through 2018 to women who were residents of Texas at the time of delivery. Additional information on these data can be found in our Annual Report, specifically in the Methods Section.
Measure Information
Prevalence is the number of birth defect cases divided by live births in a population during a specific period of time, multiplied by 10,000 (i.e., cases per 10,000 live births).
Confidence Intervals are 95% for prevalence; this means that the confidence interval contains the true prevalence of a birth defect 95% of the time.
Average Annual Cases is the total number of cases during a specific period of time divided by the number of years in that time period.
Percentage of Cases is the proportion of cases for a given defect that have a certain pregnancy outcome (e.g., 63% of anencephaly cases have a non-live pregnancy outcome).