Page 4 - Human Umbilical Cord Mesenchymal Stem Cells

MSCs transplantation for osteoarthritis treatment

3. Results

3.1. Trial selection
The data search yielded 84 references, 41 of which were excluded for various reasons (21
review articles, 13 in vitro experiments or animal models, 5 case reports, and 2 meta-analyses).
A further 32 studies were excluded because they did not provide clinical data with enough
detail or they were not RCTs. Finally, 11 trials met the specified inclusion criteria [25–35]. Fig
1 provides a flow-chart illustrating the search results and the exclusion mechanisms for certain
studies. The quality assessment of the 11 trials is summarized in Table 1. Six of the included
studies scored an A on the Jadad scale [26,27,28,30,31,32], and fivescored a B [25,29,33,34,35].
The funnel plots for the six analyses regarding VAS, IKDC, WOMAC, Lequesne, Lysholm,
and Tegner were largely symmetrical (S1 Fig). Egger’s test and Begg’s test showed that there
was no evidence of publication bias (P>0.05). Thus, publication bias did not seem to be pres-
ent in our study.

Fig 1. Flow diagram showing the study identification, screening, and inclusion process.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0175449.g001

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