Table 2. Characterization of articles according to author, year of publication, type of study, methodological approach, and level of evidence.

Reference	Country	Type of study	Level of evidence
McArthur et al. 12	Canada	Longitudinal cohort (n=846)	IV
Ten Velde et al. 5	Netherlands	Exploratory cohort (n=233)	IV
Liu et al. 13	China	Prospective cohort (n=3831)	IV
Choi et al. 14	China	Exploratory cohort (n=171)	IV
Zhang et al. 15	China	Prospective cohort (n=1793)	IV
Adachi et al. 16	Japan	Prospective cohort (n=4875)	IV
Li et al. 17	Canada	Longitudinal cohort (n=2026)	IV
Alghadir et al. 18	Saudi Arabia	Prospective cohort (n=214)	IV
Saxena et al. 19	India	Prospective cohort (n=1237)	IV
Cardy et al. 20	Canada	Prospective cohort (n=414)	IV
Xiao et al. 2	China	Prospective cross-sectional (n=1680)	IV
Pietrobelli et al. 21	Italy	Observational longitudinal (n=32)	IV
Kołota and Głąbska 22	Poland	Longitudinal (n=1334)	IV
Hartley et al. 23	France	Longitudinal (n=1777)	IV
Alvarez-Peregrina et al. 24	Spain	Cross-sectional (n=1600)	V
Helito et al. 25	Brazil	Cross-sectional (n=387)	V
Shuai et al. 26	China	Cross-sectional (n=192)	V
Oliva et al. 27	Italy	Cross-sectional prospective (n=9974)	V
Surekha et al. 28	India	Cross-sectional (n=2000)	V
Hadianfard et al. 6	Islamic Republic of Iran	Cross-sectional (n=510)	V
Tandon et al. 29	United States	Cross-sectional l (n=1000)	V
Peddie et al. 30	Canada	Cross-sectional (n=146)	V
Guo et al. 31	China	Descriptive cross-sectional (n=10,416)	V
Berki and Pikó 32	Hungary	Cross-sectional (n=705)	V
Wang et al. 33	China	Prospective cross-sectional (n=123,535)	V
Chambonniere et al. 34	France	Cross-sectional (n=6491)	V
Hourani et al. 35	Jordan	Cross-sectional (n=477)	V
Andriyani et al. 36	Indonesia	Qualitative (n=20)	V
Ceylan et al. 37	Türkiye	Descriptive cross-sectional (n=384)	V
Yakşi et al. 38	Türkiye	Cross-sectional (n=506)	V
Hashem et al. 39	Egypt	Cross-sectional (n=765)	V