Figure 1.

Search strategy flowchart. From the 1072 abstracts collected in PubMed, using the keywords “exosome” and “cardiovascular”, 31 reports were used for the meta-analysis and 1041 were excluded, according to the three criteria levels depicted in the right. Even though many studies described molecular analysis, namely using cell culture, these were not considered due to the lack of biofluid (plasma, serum, urine, pericardial fluid), exosome content description, protein cargo expression, and/or statistical relevance to the analysis. PCA, principal component analysis.