Strengths and limitations
Our study was the first meta-analysis of the effect orlistat on serum uric acid level and incorporated a sufficient number of RCT and publication in our analysis. We had precise search strategy. We didn’t find substantial heterogeneity in our analysis. However, some limitations of the present study should be noted. First, the characteristics of included study participants were heterogeneous (i.e., patients with hypercholesterolemia, T2 DM, metabolic syndrome, PCOS, and NAFLD). In addition, the number of inclusion trials in some subgroups was few, which might results in false negative results. Moreover, we included articles only in English language and articles in other languages may influence our results. What also is important to be noted is that the included studies in our meta-analysis did not report their results for men and women separately. Accordingly, we were not able to compare the pooled effect size between men and women.