Prevalence of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome in Iran: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

Background and Carpal Tunnel Syndrome is the most common entrapment neuropathy caused by increased pressure of median nerve in the wrist area. The results of electronic searches in several studies have shown different prevalence rates of this syndrome in Iran in different populations. So, the purpose of this study was to estimate the prevalence of carpal tunnel syndrome in Iran using meta- analysis.
Relevant keywords were searched in national and international databases. The articles were then selected based on inclusion/ exclusion criteria and quality assessment. Data including author names, year of publication, sample size, sample descriptions, assessment criteria, and the prevalence rate of carpal tunnel syndrome were entered in Excel. The standard error of the prevalence of carpal tunnel syndrome in each study was calculated based on the formula for binomial distribution. According to the I-squared heterogeneity and Q indices, the random or fixed effect model were used to estimate the overall prevalence. Also, sensitivity analysis, meta-regression, and survey of publication bias were carried out.
A systematic search was completed and 10 articles met the inclusion criteria with 11 evidence of the prevalence of carpal tunnel syndrome in Iran. A total of 14525 people had been studied in whom the prevalence of carpal tunnel syndrome varied from 1.82% to 64.6%. The overall prevalence of carpal tunnel syndrome with physical examination based on the random effect model was estimated to be 17.53% (95% CI, 13.74- 21.31%).
This meta- analysis showed a relatively high prevalence of carpal tunnel syndrome in Iran. But, the frequency of this syndrome in different target groups requires further investigations.