Risk of Parkinson’s disease in hepatitis B and C populations: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a common neurodegenerative disorder, and its association with viral hepatitis has been debated. We performed a meta-analysis to examine the association between PD risk and viral hepatitis. Medline, EMBASE, and the Cochrane library were searched from inception till July 2022. Meta-analysis was conducted using a fixed-effect model with the inverse variance method. Three groups were compared to controls: infection with either hepatitis B or C virus (HBV and HCV, respectively), or coinfection with both viruses. We found 551 records, and six studies comprising of 2,566,947 patients were included in the analysis. PD risk was increased in HCV-infected population (OR 1.10, 95% CI 1.03–1.17, p = 0.005) and (HR 1.37, 95% CI 1.26–1.49, p < 0.001). This increase was not observed for the HBV-infected and HBV–HCV-coinfected coinfection populations. For pooled OR, the risk was significantly lower in HBV-infected (OR 0.79, 95% CI 0.76–0.83, p < 0.001) but not significantly different in HBV–HCV-coinfected populations (OR 0.96, 95% CI 0.82–1.12, p = 0.57). For pooled HR, the risk was significantly higher in both HBV-infected (HR 1.22, 95% CI 1.14–1.31, p < 0.001) and HBV–HCV-coinfected populations (HR 1.29, 95% CI 1.05–1.58, p = 0.013). We found that the risk of PD was increased in the HCV-infected population, but results were inconsistent in those with HBV and HBV–HCV infections. Our findings provide impetus for further clinical and functional studies to unravel the role of the adaptive immune system in PD.