Prevalence of urolithiasis in adults of the Eastern Mediterranean region: A systematic review and meta-analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose: To determine the pooled prevalence of urolithiasis among adults in the World Health Organization Eastern Mediterranean Region (EMRO) and to analyze variations by gender and geography. Materials and methods: This systematic review searched international databases (Scopus, PubMed/Medline, Web of Science, Embase, ProQuest) from inception until July 2024 for observational studies reporting urolithiasis prevalence in EMRO adults. Study quality was assessed using the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale. Heterogeneity was evaluated using Cochran’s Q test and the I² index. A random-effects meta-analysis was performed using STATA v14. Results: From 1,773 identified records, 39 studies met the inclusion criteria. The pooled prevalence of urolithiasis was 14.17% (95% CI: 10.88–17.47). The prevalence was significantly higher in men (19.48%; 95% CI: 13.58–25.37) than in women (13.34%; 95% CI: 9.37–17.31). Subgroup analyses revealed the highest prevalence in upper-middle-income countries (17.40%) and in Iran (17.89%). Meta-regression showed no statistically significant temporal trend (Reg Coef = 0.02, P = .128) or association with the Human Development Index (Reg Coef = 0.50, P = .568). Conclusion: This meta-analysis confirms a high and rising prevalence of urolithiasis in the EMRO region, with a significant disease burden in men. These findings highlight a critical public health issue and underscore the need for targeted preventive strategies and resource allocation across the region.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".