Utility of Pentraxin-3 as a biomarker for diagnosis of acute appendicitis: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

"Declarations Conflict of interestThe authors confirm that there are no relevant financial or non-financial competing interests to report. Conflict of interest The authors confirm that there are no relevant financial or non-financial competing interests to report."

"Funding Open Access funding provided by University of Turku (UTU) including Turku University Central Hospital."

"The present systematic review was registered in the International prospective register of systematic reviews (PROSPERO) on 07 Jan 2022 (CRD42022296832). The study was conducted as per the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines []. Two investigators, NK and SA, searched the PubMed, Embase, Scopus and Web of science databases systematically. The search terms (Pentraxin-3) AND (appendicitis) were used to identify all papers highlighting the role of PTX-3 as a biomarker for AA. No age filter was applied and the studies including both children and adults were included. Cross citations and articles not included in the above databases were also identified by snowballing and reverse snowballing. The duplicate entries were removed and the remaining articles were screened to select the relevant studies as per the eligibility criteria."