Prevalence of different pain patterns in patients with COVID-19: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Background and Objectives: Pain assessment is very important in these patients, but no comprehensive systematic reviews / meta-analyses (SRs/MAs) have been performed so far For this reason, this study was performed to determine the prevalence of pain in patients with Covid-19 in the world by SR/MA method Methodology: The researchers collected English language articles in which COVID-19 was confirmed and all SRs/MAs and case reports articles were excluded Search was carried on at SCOPUS (R), PubMed (R) / MEDLINE (R), Web of Science (R), Science Direct (R) and Google Scholar's search engine To extract the data the checklist contained general information about articles, e g authors' names, year of publication, number of patients, country, journal's name, and specific information, e g prevalence and percentage of 'sore throat', 'abdominal pain', 'chest pain', 'headache' and 'myalgia' Results: According to the findings, 326 articles were extracted in the initial search, 218 articles of these were classified as duplicate articles because of the frequency in their authors, magazines and sample size, and were excluded Also, by reviewing the title, abstract and complete files of articles, 73 articles were excluded as being non-relevant Out of 35 remaining articles 2 were SRs/MAs in the field of COVID-19 by Iranian authors, and were also excluded In the remaining 33 articles included in this SR/MA study, the sample size was 3781 patients Regarding the prevalence of pain in patients, prevalence rate of abdominal pain was 0 02% (95% CI: 0 01, 0 04), headache 10% 95% CI: 0 10 (0 08, 0 12) and myalgia was 18% 95% CI: 0 18 (0 14, 0 23), chest pain was 4% (95% CI: 0 04 (0 01, 0 06), Sore throat was 12% (95% CI: 0 12 (0 08, 0 15) Conclusion: The results of this study can serve as important criteria to be considered for screening as well as identifying suspected cases of COVID-19 These can also be helpful in formulating the guidelines for the periodic physical evaluation and for clinical management of COVID-19 patients