Prevalence of Medicinal Herbs Use During Pregnancy in the World: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

The use of herbs during pregnancy is on the rise today, but some of these plants can not only cause side effects in the mother and fetus but also have drug interactions. this systematic survey and meta-analysis reading were administered to define the outbreak of herbs used by women during pregnancy. the present work was performed using the meta-analysis method from march 2000 to february 2019. the search process was carried out in iranian databases such as sid, regional information center for science and technology (ricst), mag-iran, irandoc, barakat knowledge network system, iranian national library and international databases such as pubmed / medline, cochrane library, scopus, science direct, web of sciences, embase, ebsco, and google scholar. keywords including medicinal herbs, medicinal plant, plant, extract, women, and pregnancy. the heterogeneity of investigations was scrutinized using the i² index. analysis was carried out using comprehensive meta-analysis software. a total of 73 articles were contained in the meta-analysis process. based on the results, the general outbreak of medicinal herbs use during pregnancy was 32.4% (95% ci: 28.2%-36.8%). the results of meta-regression showed that increasing in sample size leads to decreased overall prevalence of herbal medicine consumption during pregnancy and increasing in the year of research leads to increased overall prevalence of herbal drug use during pregnancy, which both were statistically significant (p <0.05). the prevalence of medicinal herbs consumption during pregnancy is relatively high.