The correlation of lymphocyte subsets, natural killer cell, and Parkinson's disease: a meta-analysis

The correlation between immunity and Parkinson's disease was presented in many papers, which also discussed lymphocyte and natural killer cell. But these studies have yielded inconsistent results. To systematically review the relationship between the lymphocyte subsets/natural killer cell and the risk of Parkinson's disease, we electronically searched the SpringerLink, Web of Science, Ebsco-medline with full text, Pubmed, Elsevier-ScienceDirect, Ovid-lww-oup, Wanfang Data for case-control trials on comparing the number of peripheral blood lymphocyte subsets and natural killer cell in Parkinson's patients and healthy controls. According to the Cochrane methods, the reviewers selected literature, extracted data, and assessed the quality. Then, a meta-analysis was performed using RevMan 5.2. Finally, 21 case-control trials including 943 cases of Parkinson's disease were fit into our data analysis. Meta-analysis showed that the decreased numbers of CD3+, CD4+ lymphocyte subsets and the increased number of natural killer cell were found in Parkinson's disease patients. In the intermediate and late stage of PD, CD8+ lymphocyte subsets had a significant decrement. However, the number of B lymphocyte subsets had no significant association with Parkinson's disease. The lymphocyte subsets and NK cell may be associated with the risk of Parkinson's disease.