Figure 1.

Process of study selection.

Of the initial 126 potentially relevant publications, 94 were excluded after primary reading, including 34 experimental animal studies and 60 case reports or reviews. The remaining 32 articles were examined further, and 27 studies unrelated to intracranial artery stenosis were excluded. Of the remaining five full articles, two were excluded because they were non-RCTs. Thus, two RCT studies were analyzed. RCTs: Randomized controlled trials.