Living related and living unrelated kidney transplantations: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Table 1 Study design

Patients	Patients underwent kidney transplantation
Literature search	Keyword search in PubMed, Google scholar and Scopus
Databases	Pubmed, Ovid, MEDLINE, EMBASE, the Cochrane Controlled Trials Register, HealthSTAR, CINAHL, Google, and Google Scholar
Limits	Only comprehensive articles without time limit Humans In English
Keywords	Kidney transplantation Renal transplant Related Unrelated
Eligibility criteria	Article in Full-text (no abstracts) Unique publication (no duplicate articles) Reported each of the interested outcomes (graft survival rate, and acute rejection rate) Original report as determined from reading the abstract or if necessary the full text Outcome reported in a usable form (each surgical approach was reported as a separate cohort, no additional confounding treatments, no missing or unreliable data; could not have > 10% difference in values between text and tables Reported on surgical approaches of interest
Exclusion criteria	Duplicate patient population, where some or all of the same patients were included in a different study reporting on the same parameters (prevents double counting) Early case experience (prevents bias toward approaches with more experienced surgeons)
Data abstraction	Articles needed to report which contain each of outcome of interest to be included in the analysis Data were abstracted by two individuals into a custom database table including list of variables. 50% of articles were abstracted by one reviewer and other 50% with other one. The data for 50% of the articles was double-entered by a second individual, and any discrepancies were resolved through repeated review and discussion prior to data analysis All primary outcomes were then double-checked and any discrepancies resolved Variables in four types were abstracted from each study: Those necessary to determine inclusion and exclusion criteria, surgical approach, baseline patient characteristics, and clinical outcomes All studies were reviewed by two independent reviewers using the total QASs (Table 3) to assess the methodological quality of the studies that were included. Although the QASs were reported for each study, they were not used to weight the studies in the meta-analysis
Primary outcomes	Graft survival rate
Secondary outcomes	Acute rejection rate
Controls for Publication bias	Performed a funnel plot analysis

QASs: Quality assessments.