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. 2026 Mar 4;17:1748490. doi: 10.3389/fendo.2026.1748490

Figure 1.

Flowchart illustrating participant selection for a study: beginning with 12,008 individuals, multiple exclusion criteria are applied, resulting in a final analytic sample of 10,946 participants, 36.59 percent males and 63.41 percent females.

STROBE flow chart of the study population. Flowchart depicting the sequential exclusion criteria applied to derive the final sample from an initial pool of 12,008 collected scans. Participants were excluded based on age criteria (n = 84), medical conditions affecting bone metabolism (n = 308), medications affecting bone metabolism (n = 254), HRT (n = 66), surgically induced menopause (n = 88), artifacts or poor scan quality (n = 95), statistical outliers (n = 152), and missing data (n = 15). After applying all exclusion criteria, the final analytic sample consisted of 10,946 individuals, including 4,005 males (36.59%) and 6,941 females (63.41%).