“…There was significant difference in the SMDs of Shannon index between HTN and controls (SMD = −0.115, 95% CI = −0.227 to −0.003, p = 0.045, I 2 = 0.0%), while nonsignificant differences were found in Simpson, Chao1, and ACE indexes (SMD = 0.181, 95% CI = −0.107 ) studies [14,24,30,33,34,37,[39][40][41] measured the β-diversity of gut microbiota mainly using principal coordinate analysis or principal component analy-sis. Consistent differences between hypertensive and control were reported by eight (8/10) studies [14,24,30,33,34,36,40,41]. Among them, Zhu's study [34] confirmed a distinct difference among people with different altitudes whereas Wang's study [37] and Chen's study [39] found no differences between the two groups.…”