“…Excluding 18 non-randomized controlled trials and outcome indicators, 18 studies were finally included in this meta-analysis. Fifteen of the 18 studies evaluated the association between NAFLD and DR ( Targher et al, 2008 ; Targher et al, 2010a ; Yoneda et al, 2012 ; Lv et al, 2013 ; Yang et al, 2013 ; Kim et al, 2014 ; Somalwar and Raut, 2014 ; Vendhan et al, 2014 ; Lin et al, 2016 ; Yan et al, 2016 ; Afarideh et al, 2019 ; Zhang et al, 2019 ; Lombardi et al, 2020a ; Mikolasevic et al, 2021 ; Wen et al, 2021 ), five studies evaluated the association between liver fibrosis and DR in patients with NAFLD ( Lombardi et al, 2020a ; Lombardi et al, 2020b ; Sawadjaan Leila and Ong Janus, 2020 ; Leite et al, 2021 ; Mikolasevic et al, 2021 ), and two of these studies included both of the above-mentioned research objectives ( Lombardi et al, 2020a ; Mikolasevic et al, 2021 ). The details of identifying qualified research and the exclusion criteria are given in Figure 1 .…”