Inclusion criteria and exclusion criteria
All included studies meet the following criteria: (1) studies published in English or Chinese; (2) studies used a cross-sectional, case–control or clinical cohort design; (3) studies that measured resistin levels in both case and healthy control groups; (4) studies offered sufficient data; and (5) only the most recent or largest sample size study was included for duplicated publications.
The exclusion criteria were as follows: (1) review articles, conference abstracts and case reports; (2) articles did not contain plasma/serum resistin levels of CD or UC patients or healthy controls; (3) duplicate reports or ambiguous data; and (4) studies were not performed in humans.