Study selection and characteristics
A total of 1122 articles were identified using electronic and manual research (Supplementary figure 1). After reviewing titles and abstracts, 19 studies were selected for full-text reading. Of them, 14 were excluded (1 study was not available for the raw data) to finally include 4 eligible articles by December 12th, 2019 [8-10, 17]. Among these, Gou et al. measured the levels of complement pathway factors twice at different time points, to which we refer as “Gou, sequential.” In addition to this, we added the data from our current study. The respective characteristics of the included studies are described in detail in Supplementary table S11. The study quality assessed by the Newcastle-Ottawa scale scored 8 in three studies and 6 in one study (range, 1 (very poor) to 9 (very high), Supplementary table S2).