Seroprevalence of <em>Toxoplasma gondii</em> and its associated risk factors among women of reproductive age in Saudi Arabia: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Abstract

Toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii), which infects many warm-blooded animals including humans, causes toxoplasmosis, a globally widespread condition. To date, no research has explored the overall T. gondii infection seroprevalence among women in Saudi Arabia, nor have the risk factors associated with the infection been examined in the Saudi Arabian context. The present systematic review and meta-analysis therefore aimed to investigate toxoplasmosis seroprevalence based on previous study samples of Saudi women of reproductive age, and to establish the potentially risk factors in this national context. PubMed, Science Direct, and Scopus were searched for studies on T. gondii seroprevalence among women in mainland Saudi Arabia published between January 2000 and December 2017. Seroprevalence with 95% CI was presented for each study, and point estimates and their 95% CIs of pooled seroprevalence were then calculated. Twenty papers were eligible for inclusion, with samples totaling 13,597 females of childbearing age (ie, between 15 and 49 years) covering various regions of Saudi Arabia. The pooled estimation for T. gondii prevalence using a random-effect model was calculated as 27.8% (95% CI =20.6%–36.3%). A significant association was observed between age and T. gondii seroprevalence. This review represents the first comprehensive and systematic evaluation of T. gondii infection seroprevalence among Saudi Arabian women, and reports a high prevalence of Toxoplasma infection. Further research is required to support the development of more cost-effective preventive strategies.

Potential risk factors associated with seropositivity for Toxoplasma gondii among pregnant women and HIV infected individuals in Ethiopia: A systematic review and meta-analysis

“…This in line with the studies that reported an increasing Toxoplasma gondii seropositivity with increasing age of study subjects [7,13,19,58,63,68]. This is also supported by various authors in the globe [67,[69][70][71][72][73][74]. The studies included in this review were also considered age as a potential factor [29,32,36,46].…”

Seroprevalence of toxoplasma gondii infection: An umbrella review of updated systematic reviews and meta-analyses

“…Alzaheb reported in a systematic review and meta-analysis that 27.8 seroprevalence of T. gondii in women of reproductive age in Saudi Arabia. [ 43 ]…”

Toxoplasma gondii in lactating animals: potential risk to milk consuming population in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa

“…Globally prevalence of T. gondii is variable, different countries ranging from zero to hundred percent prevalence rates depending upon their civilizations, societies, inhabitant's life styles, animal's age and climate conditions (Lashari et al, 2018;Thai et al, 2019). The broad dissemination of this parasite may be attributed to various factors such as its co-evolution with multiple hosts (Mukhopadhyay et al, 2020;Alzaheb, 2018;Ding et al, 2017;Sanchez and Besteiro, 2021), multiple transmission routes (Foroutan et al, 2018), presence of diverse T. gondii genotypes (Shapiro et al, 2019), long viability in the moderate environment (Galvan-Ramirez et al, 2012), longer infectious time for about 18 months (Furtado et al, 2011) and resistant to freezing, drying and even disinfection (Rahimi et al, 2015). Milk is a highly consumable complete source of food as it contains all required nutrients in good proportion.…”