“…Next, of the remaining 69 studies, a full review and detailed reading led to the exclusion of 57 studies (12 were not case-control studies; 20 were not relevant to ONHF; 25 were not relevant to VEGF, eNOS, and ABCB1). As a final screening step, 2 of the 12 remaining studies were rejected because the data was irrelevant to the topic Zheng et al, 2014), and thus 10 studies published between 2003 and 2013 (Asano et al, 2003;Koo et al, 2006;Yang and Xu, 2007;Kim et al, 2008;Kuribayashi et al, 2008;He and Li, 2009;Lee et al, 2012;Gagala et al, 2013;Kim et al, 2013) were analyzed in this meta-analysis. A total of 1025 patients with ONFH and 1730 healthy individuals were included, with sample sizes ranging from 48-807.…”