Methods
Following the PRISMA guidelines for systematic review,[11,12] two medical doctors (AEE and AOS) conducted the literature search. The databases used included Pubmed (Medline) and the more drug and pharmacological oriented database Embase (Exerpta Medica, Elsevier; Ovid). Limits ‘human’ and ‘English language’ were applied. The databases were searched from inception to June 2020. We performed two separate literature searches using relevant keywords in MESH terms combined with free text search in PubMed and in Embase.
The specific searches are described in detail in Appendix X. The two searches in PubMed and EMBASE resulted in 878 and 8,450 hits, respectively. All articles were imported to the web-based software platform Covidence.