3.1. | Study selection
Out of 79 identified publications in the initial search, 15 duplicated
studies were excluded. After screening by title and abstract, 51
unrelated studies discarded due to the primary evaluation of inclusion
criteria: unrelated title (n=33), animal study (n=16) and review (n=2)
and 14 papers were retained for full-text review. One additional trial
was extracted through hand-searching of reference lists of related
reviews. Of these articles, 9 were excluded because of the following
reasons: irrelevant (n=5), has no placebo-controlled group (n=1),
without sufficient data for outcomes (n=3). Finally, 5 studies met all
our inclusion criteria. Figure 1 demonstrates the process by
which articles were selected.