Abstract:Objective To systematically evaluate the differences in clinical features between Parkinson's disease (PD) patients with and without rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder (RBD).Methods Foreign databases including PubMed and EMbase and Chinese databases including CMB, CNKI, VIP, and Wanfang Data were searched for case-control studies on the association between PD and RBD published up to September 1, 2018. Quality assessment was performed for the articles included in the study, and Stata 12.0 was used to perform a meta-analysis.Results A total of 17 case-control studies which met the inclusion criteria were included, with 3006 PD patients in total. The meta-analysis showed that compared with those without RBD, the PD patients with RBD had a significantly older age (standardized mean difference[SMD]=0.26, 95% confidence interval[CI]:0.19-0.34;P<0.00 001), a significantly longer course of the disease (SMD=0.29, 95%CI:0.21-0.37;P<0.00 001), a significantly higher Hoehn-Yahr stage (SMD=0.22, 95%CI:0.11-0.33,P<0.00 001), a significantly higher UPDRS-Ⅲ score (SMD=0.25, 95%CI:0.15-0.36,P<0.00 001), a significantly higher dose of levodopa (SMD=0.17, 95%CI:0.08-0.26,P<0.00 001), a significantly lower Mini-Mental State Examination score (SMD=-0.23, 95%CI:-0.40 to -0.06,P=0.008), and a significantly higher proportion of patients with symptom fluctuations (OR=1.65, 95%CI:1.34-2.03,P<0.00 001), dyskinesia (OR=2.24, 95%CI:1.74-2.88,P<0.00 001), or hallucination (OR=3.15, 95%CI:2.06-4.80,P<0.00 001). There were no significant differences between the two groups in sex (OR=1.15, 95%CI:0.99-1.35,P=0.07) and age of onset (SMD=0.09, 95%CI:-0.01 to 0.19,P=0.08).Conclusions In PD patients, the development of RBD is associated with patient's age and course of disease, and the PD patients with RBD need a higher dose of levodopa, are more prone to motor complications, and have more marked non-motor symptoms, suggesting that such patients have more severe and extensive central nervous system degeneration.