Assessing psychomotor disturbances among mental disorders: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Psychomotor disturbances (PmD) emerge as common symptoms in many psychiatric diseases. However, currently it lacks a systematic description of PmD among different mental disorders, largely due to the heterogeneity of PmD manifestations. Here we conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis to investigate this question. The initial literature search covered the period from the emergence of the concept of "Psychomotor" (1937) to June 27, 2024, which identified 5,701 relevant articles, then purified into 35 cross-sectional studies encompassing five types of mental disorders with 1,828 participants for further analyses. Our results suggest that patients with various mental disorders may commonly exhibit psychomotor retardation (PmR), with subgroup analyses showing effect sizes ranging from -0.32 to -2.31 across five mental disorder types. Moreover, there is preliminary evidence that patients exhibiting PmR may also experience cognitive impairments compared to healthy controls. In sum, our results indicated that PmD may involve in clinical manifestations of different mental disorders.