Reporting guidelines and ethical considerations
Our study design and reporting adhered to the Strengthening the
Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology (STROBE) guidelines
for cohort studies.17 Due to the retrospective nature
of the study, ethical approval was waived by our institution.
Statistical techniques
Continuous variables with normal distribution were summarised using the
means and standard deviations (SD), otherwise we used medians and
interquartile ranges (IQR). Independent samples t-test was used to
evaluate association between groups, and a p -value ≤ 0.05 was
considered statistically significant. All analysis was performed using
SPSS version 26.0 (IBM Corporation, Armonk, NY).
Results