“…The full texts of 15 candidate articles were carefully reviewed, with three being excluded as a result (two with inadequate data and one having examined the same patient group as another study). Finally, 12 studies were included in the meta-analysis ( Figure 1; Ishigami et al, 2003;Ohno et al, 2005;Haas et al, 2009;Kawahara et al, 2010;Wang et al, 2011;Amoueian et al, 2015;Kim et al, 2015;Lin et al, 2015;Wu et al, 2015;Park et al, 2016;Zhang et al, 2015Zhang et al, , 2016. In total, 1388 patients from China, Taiwan, Korea, Iran, Japan, and Germany were included.…”