“…The study identified 1483 references through the electronic searches on MEDLINE, CENTRAL, EMBASE, SCOPUS, ISI, Google Scholar, clinicaltrials.gov, controlledtrials.gov, centerwatch.com and manual searches; after reading the abstracts and titles 1427 clearly irrelevant to topic and duplicate references were excluded ( Figure 1 ). From 56 potentially relevant studies after reading full texts, eight case-reports and case series were excluded ( 18 - 25 ), one study was excluded because it was conducted on patients after bone marrow transplantation ( 26 ), another study was excluded for co-infection of participants with hepatitis B ( 27 ), two reviews were excluded ( 28 , 29 ), seven studies were excluded because of low sample size 2 - 8 patients ( 30 - 36 ), one study was excluded due to lack of methodological report ( 37 ), a study was excluded because it reported just EVR ( 38 ), four studies were excluded because they were duplicate publications of the same patients data as seminar proceedings ( 39 - 42 ), 25 studies were excluded since they were prospective, without a control group ( 7 , 12 , 43 - 65 ), three non-randomized controlled trials were also excluded ( 66 - 68 ) and finally three randomized controlled trials were included in the meta-analysis ( 11 , 69 , 70 ).…”