To address whether histogenesis or EWS-FLI1 effects are primarily responsible for the NCSC-like state of ESFT cells we repeated unsupervised clustering of the aforementioned samples after excluding published [26], [27], [29] as well as novel (from the current study) EWS-FLI1 target genes.
A limitation of using EP and PCT patent applications is that this excludes published national and regional patent applications and patent applications that are not published.
The 34 childhood MGCTs analysed in this study constitute the largest series so far reported and represents a substantial addition to the 82 cases published to date (see Table 3, which includes data from the present study, but excludes published cases without a CGH profile, cases reported on more than one occasion and cases where the age of the patient was not stated).
The following criteria were used to exclude published studies: reviews and letters; lack of key information (the total number in TNBC group and non-TNBC group; the event number about the AR expression or EGFR expression or BRCA1 mutation in TNBC and non-TNBC) for calculating OR for the expression of AR and EGFR or RR for the risk of BRCA1 mutation and 95% CI; non-English articles.
We excluded books published or organized, book chapters published, articles in newspapers or magazines, and other kinds of bibliographic production from our search.
We excluded articles published before 1995; it is possible that the inclusion of relevant articles published prior to 1995 may have added to our results.
Although we excluded papers published prior to 2010, we could still indirectly access results of the studies published previously, because the included systematic reviews were presenting the results of the studies from those earlier years.
Henry et al. (2004) identified only 26 articles with 83 age contrasts, primarily because they did not conduct a comprehensive search for all relevant studies (e.g., they excluded studies published in book chapters, e.g., [11], [30]) and because a number of articles were published after the cut-off date for their meta-analysis (December 2001).
We excluded articles published prior to 2000 to ensure that the studies considered reflected secular changes that may have taken place since the only previously published literature synthesis [ 10].
