Characteristics of included trials
The trial selection was done in accordance with the preferred reporting
items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses (PRISMA) statement
flowchart demonstrated in Figure 1. To begin with, initial literature
searches from PubMed, Embase and the Cochrane library helped us identify
991 articles, 294 of which were duplicates. Of the remaining 697
articles, 445 articles were excluded after reviewing their titles and/or
abstract, leaving 252 articles to be further assessed via detailed
full-article screening, following which, 17 trials were found to satisfy
our inclusion criteria and were included in this systematic review and
meta-analysis.
The characteristics of the included trials are depicted in Table1. A
total of 6673 patients were enrolled in the 17 trials and thus were a
part of our study. The included trials were published from 2015 to 2022,
with the sample size in each trial ranging from 91 to 1043. All 17
trials were published in English. The patients’ ages ranged from 18 to
80 years. The treatment durations also differed across trials, varying
from 6 weeks to 52 weeks.