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. 2014 Sep 4;9(9):e106384. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0106384

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© 2014 Lin et al

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.

PMC Copyright notice

A total of 346 articles were selected for the meta-analysis by browsing the databases PubMed, Embase and Wanfang, of which 324 were excluded after reviewing the title and abstract, seven articles were excluded after reviewing the full publications, the reasons for exclusion were: (a) Non-association studies (b) researchers in the article did not use neither histopathologic analysis nor close clinical and imaging follow-up for at least 6 months, (c) association studies for other diseases (d), non-original articles, (e) data couldn’t be extracted or (f) repeated data from the same or similar population. Finally, a total of 15 studies with 1633 patients, who fulfilled all of the inclusion criteria, were considered for the analysis.