Fig. 1

PRISMA flow diagram of study selection process Diagram illustrates the identification, screening, and inclusion of studies for the systematic review. Initially, 94 records were identified from database searches, with no additional records from registers. After removing 37 duplicate records, 57 records were screened. All 57 reports were sought for retrieval, but 31 were not retrieved. Of the 26 reports assessed for eligibility, 12 were excluded for reasons including: epicardial adipose tissue only (n = 5), pericoronal adipose tissue only (n = 1), muscle analysis only (n = 2), and no analysis of fat tissue (n = 3). Finally, 14 new studies were included in the review, with 14 reports of new included studies