Abstract:Objective To systematically review the risk factors for postherpetic neuralgia. Methods We electronically searched databases including Pubmed, CNKI, VIP, CBM and WanFang Date from inception to September 30th 2018, to collect studies about the risk factors for postherpetic neuralgia. Two reviewers independently screened literature, extracted data and assessed the risk of bias of included studies. Then, meta-analysis was conducted using RevMan 5.3 and Stata 14.0 software. Results A total of 21 studies were included. The results of meta-analysis showed that factors as: age, mood, precursory pain, area of the lesion, the degree of pain during the acute phase, underlying disease, duration of primary treat and combination of small dose steroids were associated with the incidence of PHN, the pooled OR values and 95%CI were 5.54(4.21~7.29), 5.49(2.92~10.32), 3.99(2.46~6.48), 6.41(1.76~23.34), 6.04(3.22~11.33), 4.30(3.14~5.89), 2.44(1.85~3.22), 0.34(0.19~0.62) respectively. Conclusion Eight risk factors including age, mood, precursory pain, area of the lesion, the degree of pain during the acute phase, underlying disease, duration of primary treat were associated with the incidence of PHN, while combination of small dose steroids was protect factor on the contrary .