Statistical analysis
The collected data, related to demographic and clinical characteristics of patients, were presented as counts and proportions (categorical data) or mean, median, standard deviation (continuous data). The t-Student test was used to compare normally distributed continuous data and Wilcoxon tests for data that are not normally distributed. In line with the secondary objectives of the study, correlations between quantitative variables were investigated using Pearson’s (parametric) or Spearman’s (nonparametric) correlation coefficient. A P-value <0.05 was considered statistically significant for all analyses. The statistical elaboration of the data was performed using IBM SPSS Statistics (version 25).