congenital malformation frequencies in children from the Bryansk region following the Chernobyl disaster (2000-2017).

Background: Ionizing radiation and chemical pollution can disrupt normal embryonic development and lead to congenital malformations and fetal death. We used official government statistical data for 2000-2017 to test the hypothesis that radioactive and chemical pollutants influenced the frequency of congenital malformations in newborns of the Bryansk region of southwest Russia.

Methods: A variety of statistical approaches were used to assess congenital malformation frequencies including the Shapiro-Wilk test, White's homoscedasticity test, Wilcoxon T-test, Spearman's rank correlation test, and the inversely proportional regression.