Victor Williams

26 Chapter 2 and entered into EndNote (Clarivate Analytics, Philadelphia, USA) for deduplication. Once deduplication was complete, the remaining articles were uploaded into Rayyan software for title and abstract screening based on the inclusion criteria [27]. This was done independently by two reviewers (VW, CO). Where there was a conflict and the two reviewers could not agree, a third reviewer (AV) resolved the conflict. The full text of all the articles selected at the title/abstract stage was compiled and entered into EndNote for a full-text review and selection based on the inclusion criteria independently by two reviewers. Articles not meeting the inclusion criteria were excluded at this stage. The two reviewers first discussed and resolved disagreements and only invited the third reviewer when they did not agree. A PRISMA flow diagram (Figure 1) describes the steps adopted during article screening and selection for inclusion in the final study. Data extraction (Charting the results) The information extracted from each article is listed in Box 1 and is based on the JBI reviewer’s manual [23]. A standardised data extraction form to capture the required information was developed in REDCap as a survey [28] (Supplementary file 2). This was validated and updated by two reviewers (VW, CO) using five selected studies per JBI guidance [23]. They independently extracted data from each article into the REDCap survey (each reviewer assigned each study a predetermined code to enable comparison). At the end of data extraction, data from the REDCap spreadsheet were compared, and all discrepancies were resolved before using a merged file for data synthesis and subsequent analysis. For clarity, successful TB treatment outcome was defined as “cured or completed treatment”, while a poor outcome was defined as “relapse/treatment failure, loss to follow-up or death”. Results We identified 1,277 titles from our search (Figure 1). Of these, 945 unique titles were identified for screening after excluding duplicates. In the title and abstract screening, 916 articles did not meet the inclusion criteria, leaving 29 articles for a full-text review. Fourteen articles [13-15, 19-21, 29-36] were included in the final selection, while 15 articles were excluded. Two of five authors with contact information whose main text was unavailable were contacted but did not respond. Contact information was not available for the other three. Description of included studies The general characteristics of the 14 included studies are summarised in Table 1. Studies were conducted between 1984 and 2020, mainly in Asian (50%) and African (36%) countries. One study was conducted in South America and Europe. The articles, though

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