Statistical Methods
Descriptive statistics were expressed as mean, standard deviation (SD), median, minimum, and maximum for continuous data; and as count and proportion for categorical data. Categorical data were analysed with the Chi-Square or Fisher’s exact tests. The distribution normality of the continuous variables was calculated with the Shapiro-Wilk test. We analysed the two groups with Independent Samples T test for the normally distributed variables and with the Mann-Whitney U Test for the non-normally distributed variables. We compared the more than two groups with One-way ANOVA for the normally distributed variables and with the Kruskal-Wallis test for the non-normally distributed variables; post-hoc multiple comparison analysis was performed with significant values that have been adjusted by the Bonferroni correction. Pearson’s or Spearman’s correlation analysis was used to find the relationship between continuous variables, depending on the distribution.
Statistical analyses were performed using the IBM SPSS v.24 for Windows software and was reported with 95% confidence intervals. Values of p<0.05 were considered significant