Publication, Part of NCARDRS Congenital Anomaly Statistics: Annual Data
NCARDRS Congenital Condition Official Statistics Report, 2022
Official statistics
Minor change in title
The name of this collection of official statistics has been changed to NCARDRS Congenital Condition Statistics Report
17 October 2025 16:08 PM
Summary
In April 2025, NCARDRS turned 10 years old, and with this report, provides national data for the 5th consecutive year. In a decade, congenital condition registration coverage has increased from 22% of births in England in 2015 to providing national coverage for over 5 years.
This publication, the eighth annual congenital condition statistics report released by the National Congenital Condition and Rare Disease Registration Service (NCARDRS), part of the National Disease Registration Service (NDRS) in NHS England, contains information on congenital conditions detected in babies delivered in England between 1 January and 31 December 2022.
This report is based on curated and quality assured congenital condition registration data as of 1 July 2025.
Spreadsheet data tables with detailed estimates, a technical details document and a spreadsheet describing how ICD-10 codes are aggregated into each condition subgroup can be found at the bottom of this page as downloadable files.
The counts and rates of congenital conditions are designated as Official Statistics. Counts and rates are presented for England, for the 9 former Government Office Regions and by the 42 Integrated Care Boards (ICB) as well as by age at delivery, Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) quintile, and timing of detection. Counts and rates are presented by major condition subgroup and more granular groupings or counts for individual conditions are available in Data table 1.
The denominators used in this publication include the number of total births (live and still) and the number of live births. These are obtained from the ONS birth registrations for 2022 in England.
Highlights
New in this publication
In line with updated terminology, conditions that were previously described as “genetic” have been renamed “genomic” throughout the report. The composition of this group is unchanged, however further granularity in reporting conditions described as genomic have been added in Data table 1 and in the accompanying Condition subgroups inclusion ICD-10 list.
Changes have been made to the geographies reported to align with current administrative boundaries. Counts and rates for 2022 are now presented by the 9 former Government Office Regions (GORs) to ensure more consistency with other statistical outputs for England. This replaces EUROCAT regions used in previous reports and means that regional comparisons between this and other reports are not presented as the regions are not comparable, however further regional analysis is planned. Further breakdowns by region are now presented for pregnancy outcome and for perinatal and infant mortality.
This year, data are also presented according to Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) to provide more geographically granular data.
In the 2022 report, data has been restricted to those babies delivered to those who were resident in England at the time of their delivery. UK Crown Dependencies are no longer included in counts and rates as in previous reports as this data is no longer collected and will not be included in future reports.
Changes have been implemented to estimates reported in the timing of diagnosis section that mean that they are not directly comparable with previous years. These are described in the relevant section and in section 3 of the accompanying Technical details.
This is the first report since the congenital condition registration dataset was linked with the Maternity Services Data Set (MSDS) data which has improved efficiency in data collection and consistency in reporting demographic data across NHS England.
Key Facts
One baby was diagnosed with a congenital condition for every 39 total births (live births and stillbirths) in 2022 in England
Total birth prevalence was 255.0 per 10,000 births in 2022
One baby in every 53 live births had a congenital condition
74% of babies with a congenital condition were born alive
73% of babies with congenital conditions were detected antenatally, where the timing of detection was known
The three conditions with the highest proportion detected antenatally were abdominal wall (95%), nervous system (90%) and kidney and urinary (86%)
Congenital conditions are a leading cause of infant mortality
There were 627 infant deaths among babies with one or more congenital conditions out of the 577,046 live births in 2022, giving an infant mortality rate for congenital conditions of 10.9 per 10,000 live births
The prevalence of congenital conditions with a genomic aetiology increased with age at delivery
Women aged 40 years and older were 6 times more likely to have a baby with a condition of known genomic cause compared to those aged 20 to 24
Congenital condition prevalence was higher in more deprived areas for all conditions, and for conditions with no known genomic association
Babies in the most deprived areas were 32% more likely to have a condition with no known genomic association than babies in the least deprived areas
Acknowledgments
This work uses data that has been provided by patients and collected by the NHS as part of their care and support. The data are collated, maintained and quality assured by the National Disease Registration Service, which is part of NHS England.
Resources
Last edited: 3 November 2025 11:38 am