Prevalence and Causes Related to Fear of Vaginal Delivery in Iran: A Systematic Review

Introduction: Women with fear have a more complex labor process and are usually hospitalized in the latent phase and their labor is longer. Considering several studies on the prevalence and causes of fear of childbirth and differences in their results, the present study was conducted with the aim of systematically reviewing studies on the prevalence and causes of fear of childbirth in Iran. Methods: In this study, in order to obtain related articles, databases from SID, Iran Medex, Pubmed, Web of Science, EMBASE, Scopuse, Science direct, Google Scholar were searched. To find related articles, Persian sources with the keywords prevalence, fear, childbirth, Iran, cesarean section, vaginal delivery, natural childbirth and English sources with the keywords iran, prevalence, fear of childbirth, NVD, Cesarean and all possible combinations of these words with Boolean OR operators. AND were examined without time limit. The JBI checklist was used to evaluate the quality of the articles. Results: Out of 315 articles found, finally 15 studies (with a sample size of 4047 people) were systematically reviewed. Fear of labor pain was the most commonly reported factor among the studies, which was reported at 26-87%. The prevalence of fear was higher in young, employed and highly educated women, primiparous as well as in women without receiving pregnancy counseling.   Conclusion: The prevalence of fear of childbirth ranged from 17.3% to 89.30%. The lowest prevalence of fear of childbirth was in Talesh with 17.3% and the highest prevalence was in Tuyserkan with 89.30%. Fear of labor pain The most commonly reported cause was fear of labor. Concern about fetal-neonatal and maternal complications of childbirth was another important cause of fear of childbirth