Quality assessment
At first, after identification and screening of studies, articles were
assessed for eligibility, and finally suitable studies were included to
the Meta-analysis review. In the present study, The STROBE checklist was
used for evaluation of the quality of the selected articles based on
title and contents. The STROBE checklist composed of 22 items covering
all of the aspects of the methodology such as collection methods, tools,
type of the study, definition of the variables, statistical analysis
tests, study objectives, sample size and study population.
Depending on the quality analysis, each question was assigned to score
one point. In this checklist, the final scores for each study could
range from 0 to 44, respectively. Based on the results of the quality
assessment, studies were divided into three categories: Low
(<15.5), average (15.5–29.5) and high quality
(>30) and studies with low-quality scores were excluded
from the final meta-analysis.