Though we excluded patients with CD4+ T-cell counts <200 cells/µL at baseline from our cohort study, however, toxoplasma may exert influence during our follow-up visits when participants' CD4+ T-cell counts dropped, therefore, we performed toxoplasma testing and excluded toxoplasma infected individual from the HIV-1 monoinfection.
We were unable to take into account patients who may have expired in the outpatient setting though we excluded patients who expired in the hospital.
The statistics were still significant even though we excluded 21 patients with primary HIV infection who supposedly had an initially high baseline viral load.
Finally, our selection globally looks like that of Horrocks et al. [ 9], even though we excluded a few proteins and included several additional ones.
Among the limitations, first, hospitalizations in private hospitals were not included, and even though we excluded populations with private insurance, we could not exclude patients with a double insurance.
We were not very restrictive in our inclusion criteria with regard to types of studies as we planned to include cluster-randomised studies even though we excluded quasi-randomised studies.
Even though we excluded the first year of follow-up, we may not have avoided this possible confounding by indication, as some of these cancers may present with long periods with uncharacteristic symptoms before diagnosis.
But even remembering these events might pose a problem in some of the patients with central degenerative diseases, which might have been a relevant factor in our study, even though we excluded patients with severe dementia.
Though we excluded SNPs with MAFs below 5%, the MAF of one of the SNPs associated with DNA methylation was lower than 10% (rs752306 - see Table 1), further stretching the power of our sample.
First, even though we excluded NOK interview data from our analyses, our data on family history were reported by study participants rather than by family member themselves; therefore they may be subject to recall bias, under-ascertainment of family history, and misclassification of the primary tumor site.
