Prevalence of dysphagia in patients with multiple sclerosis: A systematic review and meta-analysis

•Dysphagia is a major disorder in patients with MS, yet its prevalence is unknown.•54 of 997 reviewed records made it to the meta-analysis, encompassing 11266 MS cases.•The overall prevalence of dysphagia across all the included studies was 44.8%. Dysphagia is a major disorder observed in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS), yet different prevalence rates are reported for it. Therefore, we designed this study to estimate the pooled prevalence of dysphagia in patients with MS. We searched PubMed, Scopus, EMBASE, Web of Science, and gray literature including references from the identified studies, reviews studies, and conference abstracts which were published up to May 2022. Articles that were relevant to our topic and could provide information regarding the prevalence of dysphagia among MS patients were included; however, articles with self-report screening strategies were excluded. The literature search found 997 articles. After eliminating duplicates, 672 articles remained. Two conference abstracts were included for final analysis. A total of 11,266 MS cases and 5047 MS patients with dysphagia were included in the meta-analysis. The overall prevalence of dysphagia across all 54 studies was 44.8 % (95 % CI: [40.4 %–49.2 %]), with a high level of heterogeneity between countries (Q=; I2 = 94.96 %; p