To evaluated the prevalence of pterygium among people aged ≥40 in China by using Meta analysis.

A literature retrieval was performed in China biology medicine disc(CBMdisc), China national knowledge infrastructure(CNKI), VIP database, WanFang database, PubMed, excerpta medica database (EMBASE), Web of Science from 1990 to 2016 according to designed searching strategy.Tailored quality evaluation standard of epidemiological research was used to evaluate the study quality of each included study.Stata 13.0 software was used to estimate the prevalence of pterygium, subgroup analysis of age, sex and region was also carried out.

Thirty-six studies were involved in this Meta analysis, including 8 English researches and 28 Chinese researches.The random effect model was used to merge 36 research data.The prevalence of pterygium among people aged over 40 in China was 13.4% [95% confidence interval(CI): 10.6%-16.5%]. Subgroup analysis results showed that the prevalence of pterygium increased with age.The prevalence of pterygium in rural region was 15.3%(95%CI: 12.1%-18.8%), which was higher than 4.0% (95%CI: 2.4%-6.1%) in urban region.The prevalence of pterygium among rural people aged ≥40 was 12.1%(95%CI: 8.6%-16.2%), which was lower than 14.7%(95%CI: 10.5%-19.5%) among rural people aged ≥50.The highest prevalence of pterygium in different age and sex subgroups was in the west region of China, followed by the east region of China and the lowest was in the central region of China.

The prevalence of pterygium among people aged ≥40 in China was high.Over the past decade, the prevalence of pterygium were different among different ages, and places of residence.

Pterygium; Prevalence; China; Epidemiology; Meta-analysis