Statistical methods
The available data of all participants were included according to the original allocation in an intention-to-treat analysis. The unsubmitted data of the participants who dropped out were treated as missing data. The normality of the data was evaluated by the Kolmogorov–Smirnov test. Intergroup comparisons of baseline data were performed by As post hoc tests, Dunnett’s test was performed to compare temporal sequences within the same group with reference to Week 4, and Bonferroni’s test was performed to analyze intergroup differences at individual time points. Correlations were evaluated based on Spearman’s rank correlation coefficients. The significance level was 5%. Stata 17.0 for Windows (Stata Corp., College Station, TX, USA) and GraphPad Prism v. 9.0 (GraphPad Inc., La Jolla, CA, USA) were used for all analyses.