California Birth defects monitoring Program

Data Sheets

The California Birth Defects Monitoring Program (CBDMP) provides ongoing surveillance on rates and trends of select birth defects and periodically publishes non-identifiable data from these surveillance efforts as a public health practice. The data sheets included below represent a selection of these major structural birth defects and genetic conditions. A Summary Birth Defects Prevalence Table, featuring all 14 conditions, is also available. For more information on the data represented please review the technical notes:

Confidence Intervals

The birth prevalence rate for a specific defect is the best estimate of the true prevalence. To understand the range of possible values for the true prevalence, we also calculate the 95% confidence interval in the Summary Birth Defect Prevalence Table. From a practical viewpoint, confidence intervals are particularly useful when dealing with small numbers of cases or where the birth defect prevalence for one group are compared with that of other groups. It helps minimize reader concern about prevalence values that appear high or different when in fact it is most likely due to random fluctuation.