Fig 1.
The life cycle of Taenia solium.
Created in BioRender. Jackson, E. (2026) https://BioRender.com/mqrbym7.
Table 1.
Detailed description of exclusion criteria for studies used in the systematic review of the identified articles.
Fig 2.
Flowchart detailing the systematic review of articles on risk factors for TSCT.
Fig 3.
Waffle charts summarizing the included studies and quality of evidence for the extracted associations, collected in our systematic review.
(A) shows the WHO region [14] where the study was conducted, with each square representing one study. The study marked “none” is a controlled laboratory study that does not have results from a specific region. (B) shows the quality of evidence for the extracted associations. Each square represents five extracted associations.
Fig 4.
Circle plot showing the number of associations found for each risk factor.
Associations are sorted by the outcome of the association (human cysticercosis, taeniasis, porcine cysticercosis, and all other outcomes) direction of association found, and the quality of evidence we determined for that association. The blue bar shows the number of associations with strong quality of evidence, the green bar shows the number of associations with moderate quality of evidence, and red shows the number of associations with weak quality of evidence. *Indicates bars set to zero because the large number of reported associations made it impossible to visualize the other associations. Further details on category breakdowns, including those categories set to zero, can be seen in Fig 5A–5D.
Fig 5.
Bar plots showing the number of associations for each risk factor-outcome association with at least five associations extracted: (A) for those with a human cysticercosis outcome, (B) human taeniasis, and (C) porcine cysticercosis.
Associations are stratified by the direction of the association (increased risk in orange, decreased risk in blue, or neutral in gray). Each chart separates associations rated as strong or moderate (SM) next to associations rated as weak (W). Percentages above each bar represent the percentage of associations in that category that increased the risk (above the 0-axis) or reduced the risk (below the 0-axis) For the sake of visual clarity, the percentage of evidence of neutral quality in each bar is not displayed.