Newborn Screening Programs in the Middle East and North Africa: A Scoping Review

Purpose: Newborn screening (NBS) is a public health intervention that identifies infants at risk of serious congenital, metabolic, endocrine, and genetic conditions before symptoms appear, enabling early treatment that can prevent death, disability, and lifelong morbidity. The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has an elevated burden of genetic disease driven in part by high consanguinity rates (25–70% in several countries), making NBS a particularly high-yield intervention. However, program development across the region has been uneven, and no recent systematic mapping exercise has synthesized what is screened, how programs are implemented and followed up, what outcomes have been reported, and what barriers shape expansion across MENA as a whole. This scoping review will systematically map the peer-reviewed and grey literature captured across Ovid MEDLINE, Embase, Cochrane, and Global Index Medicus/IMEMR to characterize the current landscape of NBS programs across 20 MENA countries, including implementation status, coverage, screened conditions, screening and follow-up processes, reported outcomes, and barriers to expansion. Methods: This review follows the JBI scoping review methodology and PRISMA-ScR reporting guidelines. Screening will proceed in two independent-reviewer stages (title/abstract, then full text), preceded by a pilot round to calibrate inclusion/exclusion criteria. Data will be charted using a structured extraction spreadsheet covering program characteristics, conditions screened, coverage and process metrics, outcomes, barriers, expansion strategies, ethics considerations, and cost data. Expected outcomes: This review will produce a country-by-country map of NBS program maturity across MENA (national/pilot/absent), a descriptive synthesis of screened conditions and screening technologies by sub-region, and a thematic summary of reported barriers, expansion strategies, and ethical considerations. Rather than testing a hypothesis, the review is expected to identify evidence gaps, countries or program dimensions (e.g., cost-effectiveness data, long-term outcomes) that are underreported in the literature, and to inform regional policy discussions and future primary research or systematic reviews on specific NBS conditions or outcomes where sufficient evidence exists.