Objective: In this systematic review and meta-analysis, we aimed to evaluate the prevalence of central pain and how this symptom may affect the patient’s quality of life.

Background: Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the second most common neurodegenerative disease in the world, affecting up to 1% of the global population. In addition to the motor symptoms of PD, patients also suffer from non-motor symptoms, such as central pain that is extremely debilitating to the patient.

Method: We registered the research protocol for this study in PROSPERO. Articles that observe patients diagnosed with PD and central pain were included. We searched PD and central pain studies on the Embase, Scopus, and PubMed platforms until December 2024.

Results: In total, we found 3663 articles. The search yielded 23 articles considered to have a low risk of bias. The prevalence of central pain in patients observed with PD was 7.23%; for prospective cohort studies, a prevalence of 5.48%; for cross-sectional studies, it was 9.33%; for control case studies, 3.84%; and for retrospective cohort studies, it was 4.90%. However, we observed a high heterogeneity among the results except for the retrospective studies with moderate heterogeneity (I2 39) [figure 1].

Conclusion: We believe this heterogeneity is due to the diagnostic method, even when the articles did not consider treatments such as deep brain stimulation that may affect pain perception. Through this meta-analysis, we observed that the prevalence of central pain was 7.23% in patients with PD. We hope that with the result of our study, patients with PD receive due attention to this painful symptom, thus improving the quality of life of patients. It is also necessary that future studies evaluate whether patients received deep brain stimulation treatment and receive the specific diagnosis for central pain.

Prevalence of Central Pain in Parkinson’s Disease

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MDS Abstracts - https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/prevalence-of-central-pain-in-parkinsons-disease-a-systematic-review-and-meta-analysis/