3. Results
3.1 General characteristics of included studies
In total, 300 articles were retrieved from PubMed following search strategy which were then screened for selection of interested studies. Following exclusion criteria, 195 articles were removed, and the rest 106 full-texts articles were assessed in depth following eligibility criteria. Finally, 42 articles were included in this meta-analysis for assessing the associations ofUGT1A1*6/*28 or ABCC2 c.3972C>T with irinotecan induced severe toxicities [12,14,21,22-24,26-31,34,35,47-74]. The complete selection process of articles following PRISMA guidelines is shown in Figure 1.
General characteristics of included articles e.g. author name, year of publication, where the study was undertaken, design of study, genotyping method, chemotherapy regimen, dose and schedule of irinotecan, toxicity assessed etc. is shown in Table 1.