The association of Raynaud's syndrome with cisplatin-based chemotherapy - a meta-analysis

Vasospastic disorders of the digital circulation such as the Raynaud's syndrome (RS) are known side-effects of treatment of cisplatin-based chemotherapy. The prevalence of RS in patients during treatment with cisplatin-based chemotherapy is not well-defined.

The objective of this paper was to assess the prevalence of RS in patients receiving cisplatin-based chemotherapy - a meta-analysis of published data was performed.

The PubMed database of the National Library of Medicine and ISI Web of Knowledge was used for studies dealing with RS and patients receiving cisplatin-based chemotherapy. The studies provided sufficient data to estimate the prevalence of RS in patients receiving cisplatin-based chemotherapy. A forest plot was determined by the revealed prevalences. Statistical analysis was based on methods for a random effects meta-analysis and a finite mixture model for proportions. Publication bias was investigated with the linear regression test (Egger's method). A meta-regression was conducted by the year of publication and latitude.

24 eligible studies, contributing data on 2749 subjects, were included in this meta-analysis. For RS in patients receiving cisplatin-based chemotherapy a pooled prevalence of 24% and 95% CI (0.175, 0.313) was obtained. A mixture model analysis found four latent classes. Statistically, publication bias was not present (p-value 0.74). The meta-regression indicated that the odds ratio increased when the latitude increased, too (p-value 0.011).

Despite some heterogeneity there is a possible indication of an association between RS and patients receiving cisplatin-based chemotherapy.