As shown in Fig. 1, a total of 2702 publications were identified; 2565 studies were excluded after title and abstract screening. Among the remaining 137 articles which were assessed for full-text review, 98 were excluded owing to the following reasons: (i) the intervention (n = 5) or outcome (n = 18) was considered to be incorrect, (ii) they were out of scope (n = 5) or only abstract (n = 68), (iii) the study design was not eligible for inclusion (n = 1), and (iv) the studies were not published in the English language (n = 1). Finally, 43 articles were considered for the present analysis; these included 40, 1, and 2 studies pertaining to the FRAX [21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57,58,59,60], FRA-HS [8], and DeFRA [9, 61] tools, respectively.

Among the selected articles, 14, 20, and 8 studies had a retrospective [8, 23, 26,27,28, 33, 35, 36, 43, 53, 59,60,61], prospective [22, 25, 30,31,32, 38,39,40,41,42, 47,48,49,50,51,52, 55,56,57,58], and cross-sectional [9, 24, 29, 34, 37, 44,45,46] designs, respectively; 1 article described a randomized clinical trial [21]. Among the publications, 14 [23,24,25, 33, 34, 36, 40, 44, 46, 49, 54, 55, 57, 60] were from Asia (Israel, China, Japan, India, Palestine, and Thailand), 21 [8, 9, 22, 26, 28, 29, 31, 35, 37,38,39, 41,42,43, 45, 48, 50, 52, 56, 59, 61] were from European countries (Italy, Spain, Poland, France, Denmark, Norway, Portugal, United Kingdom and the Netherlands), 5 [27, 30, 47, 51, 58] were from America, and 3 [21, 32, 53] were from Oceania (Australia, New Zealand). Eleven studies [8, 25, 26, 33, 38,39,40, 48, 52, 56, 57] considered subjects aged more than 40 years, 2 studies [34,