*2.6. Statistical Analyses*

The statistical analysis was performed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS 21.0, International Business Machines Chicago, IL, USA). Descriptive statistics are presented as mean ± standard deviation (SD). Levene and Shapiro–Wilks tests were performed to check for homogeneity and normality of the data, respectively. A Student's t-test for unpaired data was used to evaluate differences between groups. Additionally, the standardized mean differences were calculated using Cohen's effect size (ES) (95% confidence interval) for all comparisons. Threshold values for ES statistics were as follows: >0.2 small, >0.5 moderate, >0.8 large [29]. The different correlations between the parameters were evaluated using Pearson's correlation (r). Significance level was set at *p* ≤ 0.05.
