Here's a forum post showing an example of prepared statements letting
you assign a variable value to the limit clause:
However, I think this bug should get some attention because I can't
imagine that prepared statements within a procedure will allow for any
procedure-compile-time optimizations. I have a feeling that prepared
statements are compiled and executed at the runtime of the procedure,
which probaby has a negative impact on efficiency. If the limit
clause could accept normal procedure variables (say, a procedure
argument), then the database could still perform compile-time
optimizations on the rest of the query, within the procedure. This
would likely yield faster execution of the procedure. I'm no expert
though.