Prevalence of sarcopenia in Parkinson's disease: A systematic review and meta-analysis

We meta-analysed the sarcopenia prevalence among patients with Parkinson´s disease (PD) in comparison to a control group and tested the effects of age, sex, sarcopenia assessments, and PD progression in the sarcopenia prevalence. The literature search was performed using five databases in March 2022. The prevalence of sarcopenia in patients with PD was 3 times higher than in the control group (OR 3.98). Subgroup analyses showed that among individuals aged ≥ 70 years the higher prevalence of sarcopenia in PD compared to controls (OR 5.32, P=0.08) tended to be higher (P=0.08) than the group < 70 years. Regarding PD progression, the prevalence of sarcopenia was not different between individuals scoring < 2.5 and ≥ 2.5 in the Hoehn and Yahr scale. Patients with PD have a higher probability of developing sarcopenia when compared with the control group and older PD patients trended to have even higher chance of sarcopenia than their older controls.