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Article History

Received: 30 April 2025

Accepted: 5 September 2025

First Online: 29 September 2025

Declarations

:

: The authors declare no competing interests.

: The studies protocols were conducted according to the guidelines laid down in the Declaration of Helsinki, and all procedures were approved by responsible Ethics Committees (for the ILSA study, by the Institutional Review Board of the eight participating municipalities; for the Pro.V.A. study, by the Ethics Committees of the University of Padova and of the nrs. 15 and 18 Local Health Units of the Veneto Region approved the protocol; for the BEST-FU study, by the Ethical Review Board of the National Research Council of Segrate (MI) and by the Azienda Ospedaliera “G.Salvini” of Garbagnate Milanese, MI [approval prot. 14295, 29/3/2012]). Written informed consent was obtained from all individuals in the original ILSA and Pro.V.A. while verbal informed consent was witnessed and formally recorded for the BEST-FU study.

: Data were handled and stored in accordance with the European General Data Protection Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (GDPR) ( ). The file server was firewalled within the National Research Council (CNR) intranet. To ensure privacy and security, access to the database required a password that was only given to the server administrator. Data transfer was protected by an encryption/decryption policy and password protection. In the final dataset, a unique key was assigned to each subject to ensure anonymity. Personal data were considered confidential and were removed prior to export. Data security was ensured by automatic backups. Anonymized original data in Excel, SPSS, and SAS formats were provided by the responsible of each study, along with definition and formatting information for each variable. Additionally, experts on the characteristics of the original studies were identified.