Systematic review
We carried out a systematic review and meta-analysis in order to understand how our findings relate to the broader context of studies previously published in China. We searched the China National Knowledge Internet (CNKI), Wanfang (Chinese), Web of Science and Pubmed databases without restriction for publication date and languages on January 13th, 2021. The following terms were used to achieve specific searches: ‘pediatric gynecology’, ‘adolescent gynecology’, ‘pediatric and adolescent gynecology’, ‘girls’, ‘China’ and ‘Chinese’. We retrieved additional studies by surveying references of other reports and by using the MEDLINE option ‘Related Articles.’
The initial search strategy yielded 1235 articles, of which 1198 were excluded after a review of the title and abstract. The articles involved with the disease spectrum analysis of children and teenagers’ gynecological outpatient records were included; those of full text cannot be found, having no disease spectrum data, duplicate publication or identical data, pathological analysis, and case report were excluded. None of the articles found through Pubmed and Web of Science databases met the inclusion criteria. Thirty-seven articles from CNKI and Wanfang met the necessary requirements for the study and were fully read. Of these, four articles were excluded because of overlapping data or weak study designs. Two investigators conducted the search and identified eligible studies independently. In total, 33 studies (20 outpatient and 13 inpatient studies) were included in our systematic review (Table S1). Notably, all of the included studies were originally published in Chinese journals.