Vitamin D levels do not predict the stage of hepatic fibrosis in patients with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease: A PRISMA compliant systematic review and meta-analysis of pooled data

Figure 3 Flowchart illustrating the process for the selection of the included articles. Three hundred and thirty-seven articles were identified using PubMed (n = 56)/EMBASE (n = 199)/Cochrane (n = 13)/Web of Science (n = 69) search engines. A detailed evaluation of the articles by at least two independent reviewers (total of three) assessed the sufficiency of data, the method of fibrosis qualification, and relevance to the topic in order to narrow the studies to six.