Background:Patients with maintenance hemodialysis often suffer from sarcopenia, but there are differences in the prevalence and risk factors of sarcopenia in some studies. The purpose of this study was to estimate the prevalence and risk factors for sarcopenia in Chinese maintenance hemodialysis (MHD) patients.Methods:China National Knowledge Infrastructure, Wanfang, Chinese Biological Medical Database, PubMed, Web of Science, EMBASE and The Cochrane Library were searched through their inception to 11 April 2023. Cross-sectional, case-control and cohort studies published in the Chinese or English, and performed on prevalence and risk factors of sarcopenia among Chinese MHD patients. Two reviewers independently conducted data extraction and assessed the quality of the studies. The prevalence of sarcopenia and the ORs of potential associated factors were synthesized by Stata V.14.0 software.ResultTwenty-eight studies involving 6123 MHD patients were included. The overall pooled prevalence of sarcopenia in Chinese MHD patients was 29.0% (95% CI 25.0% to 32.0%). Age, BMI, dialysis duration, hs-CRP, MQSGA, upper arm circumference and gender were significantly related to sarcopenia, with the OR of 1.17 95%CI (1.10 to 1.24), 0.67 95%CI(0.56 to 0.81), 1.16 95%CI(1.08 to 1.25), 1.35 95%CI(1.14 to 1.58), 1.75 95%CI(1.37 to 2.23), 0.72 95%CI(0.65 to 0.79) and 2.63 95%CI(1.44 to 4.83), respectively.ConclusionThe overall sarcopenia among Chinese MHD patients is high. Age, dialysis duration, hs-CRP, MQSGA score, and female are possible risk factors for sarcopenia.