Figure 1

Flow chart for identifying eligible studies. The search strategy yielded 12,010 publications, of which 1,674 were duplicates and 10,230 references were not eligible based on abstract and title review. We systematically searched the reference lists of the remaining 110 eligible articles and of 33 reviews, and contacted experts. Ninety-five additional studies were identified that were not captured with our initial search strategy. Of this total, five references of short communications await classification because we were unable to contact the author or received no answer regarding a possible publication. Full papers were obtained for 200 references. From these, 63 were excluded for not fulfilling inclusion criteria. Of the identified 137 references, 51 assessed statin risk of cancer and were excluded from the present analysis; we focused on the remaining 86 references.