Statistical analyses
Statistical analyses were performed using Statistical Package for the
Social Sciences (IBM SPSS Statistics for Macintosh, Version 25.0)
software. The continuous data were expressed as medians (interquartile
range) due to their non-normal distribution, while the categorical
variables were expressed as frequencies and percentages. For the group
comparisons, the Mann–Whitney Utest and Pearson’sχ2test were used according to the data characteristics. The curves of
freedom from adverse event were obtained using the Kaplan-Meier method
and a log-rank test was used to compare the curves of the groups. In all
statistical analyses, a P value ≤ 0.05 was considered to be
statistically significant.