“…One hundred and fifty-three articles were excluded for irrelevance. The full texts of the remaining 34 articles were evaluated, and 20 more articles were also excluded because they did not validate the components of the ceRNA loop using molecular techniques ( Wang et al, 2017 ; Yu et al, 2018 ; Zhou et al, 2019 ; Ma et al, 2020 ; Xu and Jia, 2020 ; Huaying et al, 2021 ; Lu et al, 2021 ; Ou et al, 2021 ; Tang et al, 2021 ; Zhang et al, 2021 ) and did not use human specimens or cell lines ( Jiang et al, 2016 ; Cai et al, 2017 ; Wang J. et al, 2018 ; Wang X. et al, 2018 ; Ma P. et al, 2019 ; Zhao et al, 2019 ; Li L. et al, 2020 ; Li X. et al, 2020 ; Yue et al, 2020 ; Zhou et al, 2020 ). Lastly, a total of 14 eligible articles remained ( Faghihi et al, 2010 ; Ke et al, 2019 ; Wang et al, 2019 ; Zeng et al, 2019 ; Zhu et al, 2019 ; Gao et al, 2020 ; Ge et al, 2020 ; Gu et al, 2020 , 2021 ; He W. et al, 2020 ; Yan et al, 2020 ; Yue et al, 2020 ; Fan et al, 2021 ; Zhang and Wang, 2021 ).…”