“…A total of 61 studies underwent full-length article review; 22 were excluded, as they did not include controls or report the outcome of interest. A total of 39 observational studies [4,6,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47], including 7,099 patients, finally met our inclusion criteria and were included in the meta-analysis. Figure 1 outlines our search methodology and selection process; the baseline characteristics of the included studies are summarized in Table 1.…”