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