“…The instrument consists of 27 items, relating to reporting (10 items), external validity (3 items), internal validity bias (7 items), internal validity confounding (selection bias) (6 items), and statistical power (1 item), allowing a study to be rated between 0 and 32 points. The complete list is usually applied for randomized studies, whereas for non-randomized studies, it is reduced to 17 criteria after excluding items 9,13,14,17,19,22,23,24,26, and 27, which are not applicable in non-randomized studies, leading to a maximum score of 17 points [26]. In this way, the original non-randomized controlled trials and descriptive studies positively evaluated 60% (10 points or more out of 17) of the criteria selected and included in the subsequent analyses since they presented a moderate to high methodological quality [23,25,26].…”