Fig 1.
Flow diagram of the systematic review process.
Table 1.
Summary of the randomized clinical trials.
Fig 2.
Meta-analysis of the mean difference in QoR-40 scores between the dexamethasone and control groups.
SD, standard deviation; MD, mean difference; CI, confidence interval.
Fig 3.
The Trial Sequential Analysis for the effect of glucocorticosteroids compared with placebo.
The risk of type 1 errors was set at 0.05 with a power of 0.9 when the Trial Sequential Analysis was performed. The variance was calculated from the data obtained from the included trials. A clinically meaningful anticipated mean difference of the QoR-40 score was set at 5 points. We applied the anticipated heterogeneity at 50%.
Fig 4.
The sensitivity analysis of the Trial Sequential Analysis for the effect of glucocorticosteroids compared with placebo.
The risk of type 1 errors was set at 0.05 with a power of 0.9 when the Trial Sequential Analysis was performed. The variance was calculated from the data obtained from the included trials. A clinically meaningful anticipated mean difference of the QoR-40 score was set at 15 points. We applied the anticipated heterogeneity at 50%.
Table 2.
The risks of bias of the included trials.
Table 3.
Summary of findings.