Vaidya, Aric
Lee, Patricia Ann L.
Kitaguchi, Yoshiyuki
Kakizaki, Hirohiko
Takahashi, Yasuhiro http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1363-2870
Article History
Received: 12 March 2020
Revised: 12 May 2020
Accepted: 19 May 2020
First Online: 25 May 2020
Compliance with ethical standards
:
: The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
: This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of our institution (Aichi Medical University Hospital, approval No. 2019-175) and followed the tenets of the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki.
: The IRB granted a waiver of informed consent for this study on the basis of the ethical guidelines for medical and health research involving human subjects established by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology and the Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare. The waiver was granted because the study was a retrospective review and not an interventional study and because it was difficult to obtain consent from patients who had been treated several years prior to this study. Nevertheless, at the request of the IRB, an outline of the study was published on the website of our institution and this was made available for public viewing. This public posting also gave patients an opportunity to decline participation, although no refusal was made known to us. Personal identifiers were removed from the records prior to data analysis.