Opposition from the child and/or parent/holder of parental authority also constituted exclusion criteria.
Finally, age less than 18 years, known pregnancy, and a decision to withhold life-sustaining treatment also constituted exclusion criteria.
Combined biliary reconstruction, vascular reconstruction and other simultaneous extrahepatic procedures do not constitute exclusion criteria.
Another issue, pointed out by Topcu et al regarding psychiatric disorders, constituting exclusion criteria in our study, were based on the patients' histories: schizophrenia, current suicide ideation, substance dependence, drinking problems, bipolar disorder, psychosis or receiving specialty mental health treatment.
In the current dataset however, 3.8% of the DNA-confirmed father son pairs displayed three or four RM Y-STR mutations; as such, the number of mutations constituting exclusion should be increased when using the RM Y-STRs.
This scenario is particularly relevant in the case of CRC patients, since the presence of KRAS mutations constitute exclusion criteria to treat metastatic colorectal patients with anti-EGFR therapies (30).
On the other hand, they argued that since methods for the characterization of mutations in FBN1 were not entirely sensitive, and that the possibility of locus heterogeneity could not be completely ruled out, the inability to define an FBN1 mutation or the stringent documentation of recombination between FBN1 and the MFS phenotype did not constitute exclusion criteria.
Comorbid conditions that constituted exclusion from the study included uncontrolled hypertension (>150/100 mmHg) or brain metastases, diagnosis of any second malignancy within the last 3 years, cardiac conditions, and transient ischemic attack or pulmonary embolus in the 12 months before study entry.
Smoking, pregnancy, chronic cardiovascular or metabolic illnesses, immunosuppressive medication, and age less than 21 years also constituted exclusions.
Incomplete formalin injection constituted an exclusion criterion for the study.
