A meta-analysis of the effect of multidisciplinary comprehensive care on health-related quality of life and Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale in Parkinson's disease.

Introduction: According to many reports, multidisciplinary comprehensive care alleviates Parkinson's disease (PD) more frequently than any other standard care, though the results were found to vary greatly.

Material And Methods: A systematic literature search up to July 2022 was performed and 1234 related studies were evaluated. The chosen studies comprised 1115 subjects with PD who participated in baseline trials; 633 of them were under multidisciplinary comprehensive care, while 482 were under standard care. Odds ratios (ORs) and mean differences (MDs) with 95% confidence intervals (95% CIs) were calculated to measure the results of multidisciplinary comprehensive care for PD by the contentious and dichotomous approaches with a random or fixed influence model employed.

Results: The use of multidisciplinary comprehensive care resulted in significantly better health-related quality of life (HRQL) (MD: -3.17; 95% CI: -5.98--0.35, p = 0.03) and Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS) score (MD: -5.25; 95% CI: -10.14--0.37, p = 0.04) compared to the standard care for subjects with PD. Nevertheless, no significant difference was found between multidisciplinary comprehensive care and standard care for subjects with PD regarding medication dosage (MD: 0.31; 95% CI: -0.72-1.34, p = 0.56) and caregiver strain (MD: -0.51; 95% CI: -1.69-0.67, p = 0.40).

Conclusion: Outpatient multidisciplinary comprehensive care models may improve patient-reported HRQL and UPDRS score; nevertheless, no significant difference was found in terms of medication dosage and caregiver strain compared to the standard care for subjects with PD. The small sample size of 2 out of 7 analyzed studies and the small number of studies in certain comparisons requires attention when analyzing the results.