The second screen was performed by reading the abstract of items that were not excluded at the first screen.
Forty cases were excluded at the first stage (referral to initial assessment) for a variety of reasons including; patients who did not attend their first appointment and patients with pending appointments.
The mean age, body mass index, and ethnicity of participants with both radiographs and VFA images evaluable for AAC were equivalent to the 39 who did not have evaluable radiographs or VFA images or who were excluded at their first study visit (table 1).
Structural abnormality was excluded at the first examination.
A total of 2,612 clusters fell into this category and were excluded at a first design stage.
The majority of papers excluded at the first stage were due to papers describing only the results of a phase II trial, rather than the specific design methodology.
Of 8680 articles retrieved through the database search, 6620 were excluded at the first stage of screening (title and abstract) and 1804 articles (out of the remaining 2060) were excluded after full-text screening, leaving 256 articles.
Our study has adopted a two stage approach to evaluate common variants in all WNT pathway members in relation to DN. SNPs located in genes implicated in the WNT pathways that failed to demonstrate significant association and direction of effect across all GENIE cohorts [ 22] were excluded at the first step.
During an 18-month period, 653 patients were recruited, of which 5 were excluded at the first assessment (one for low back pain that was secondary to a traumatism, another for possible infectious origin, and three for sciatica with progressive motor weakness).
Case-series and conference abstracts were excluded at the second stage of the review.
All papers excluded at this second stage of the screening process were documented along with the reasons for exclusion.
