A meta-analysis of the effectiveness and safety of safinamide for levodopa-induced motor complications in Parkinson’s disease

To systematically evaluate the effectiveness and safety of safinamide in the treatment of levodopa-induced motor complications of Parkinson's disease (PD). A search strategy was developed and PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, Cochrane Library, Chinese BioMedical Literature Database (CBM), China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), and WanFang Data were searched to find randomized controlled trials on the treatment of PD motor complications caused by levodopa with safinamide. A manual reference search was conducted for articles published until June 2022 to independently screen references, extract data, and evaluate the risk of bias in the included studies. RevMan 5.3 software was utilized to analyze the data. A total of 5 randomized controlled trials with 2061 PD patients were included, containing 1277 patients in the safinamide group (trial group) and 784 patients in the control group. Meta-analysis results exhibited that regarding effectiveness, the duration of continuous optimal drug effect without dyskinesia (On-time) of the 50 mg trial group was longer than that of the control group. The On-time of the 100 mg trial group was longer than that of the control group.The improvement of the Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale Part III (UPDRSIII) score in the 50 mg trial group was better than that in the control group. The improvement of the UPDRSIII score of the 100 mg trial group was better than that of the control group.There was no significant difference in the incidence of adverse events between the two groups. Safinamide is effective and safe in the treatment of PD motor complications caused by levodopa.