In total, 8,708 records were found in the database, and after removing duplicates, 4,678 records remained. Depending on the inclusion and exclusion criteria, 49 studies were included after reading the title, abstract, and full text. Additionally, 1 study was manually added by searching the references of retrieved studies. Finally, the systematic review and meta-analysis included a total of 52 reports from 50 studies. The flow diagram of search results is shown in Fig. 1.

PRISMA flow diagram of search results

Fifty studies [33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57,58,59,60,61,62,63,64,65,66,67,68,69,70,71,72,73,74,75,76,77,78,79,80,81,82]provided prevalence ratios. Among them, 22 studies [35, 37, 43, 46,47,48, 52, 57,58,59, 62, 63, 67, 68, 72, 76,77,78,79,80,81,82] provided odds ratios between the factors and depression among postmenopausal women. In the meta-analysis, 44 studies [33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57,58,59,60,61,62,63,64,65,66,67,68,69,70,71,72,73,74,75,76] were cross-sectional, and 6 studies [77,78,79,80,81,82] were cohort studies. Notably, the study by Ina et al. [36] separately reported the prevalence of postmenopausal depression in Korea, China, and Japan, and therefore these data were analyzed as three distinct reports.

Specifically, 52 reports from 50 studies were included, with eight were conducted in China [36, 52, 53, 59, 62, 69, 70, 76], seven in the USA [33, 34, 46, 75, 77, 79, 82], seven in Korea [36, 47, 48, 55, 57, 58, 67], six in Poland [38, 40, 44, 50, 51, 66], six in Iran [45, 49, 54, 64, 65,