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).