3.1 Search result
Our search strategy yielded 144
potentially relevant articles (91 articles from PubMed, 53 articles from
EMBASE). After the exclusion of 45 duplicate articles, 99 articles
underwent title and abstract review. Further, 94 articles were excluded
due to at least one of the
following reasons: 1) study objective was irrelevant or was not a
randomized controlled trial, 2) was not conducted in patients with pAF,
3) did not compare ablation with medical therapy or focus on an ablation
technique, or 4) same author group with the same database. This left 5
studies for full manuscript review. All 5 studies met inclusion
criteria. No additional articles were added through an additional manual
search. Thus, a total of 5 articles were included in the data analysis.
The PRISMA flow diagram is shown in figure 1