Patient characteristics and treatment features
The median age of patients included in the studies was 51.5-58 years (range from 21 to 89 years). Only 12 of the 14 studies provided information about histology, and89.14% patients had a squamous cell carcinoma (1076/1205)(Table 1) . The largest stage subgroup was FIGO stage ⅡB, which contained 64.66% (846/1313) of patients. The median follow-up for all patients was 22-60 months (range from 3 to 129 months) (Table 2) . No information on the radiotherapy technique used was available in three studies, and most patients of the other studies were treated with 3D-conformal radiotherapy. The widely adopted external beam radiotherapy regimen consisted of conventional fractionation of 1.8 Gy per fraction (8/9 studies) for a total dose of 45-50.4 Gy. The intracavitary brachytherapy regimen used in majority of patients consisted of fractionation of 7 Gy per fraction (6/10 studies) with four cycles (4/9 studies). The adopted concurrent chemotherapy regimen was standard weekly 40 mg/m2 cisplatin in most patients (10/13 studies) (Table 3) .