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Article History

Received: 16 April 2018

Accepted: 24 May 2018

First Online: 30 May 2018

Compliance with ethical standards

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: J Uchino reports grants from Eli Lilly Japan K.K., outside the submitted work. T Yamada reports grants from Nippon Boehringer Ingelheim Co., Ltd., and Ono Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd., outside the submitted work. K Takayama reports grants from Chugai-Roche Co., grants from Ono Pharmaceutical Co., personal fees from Astrazeneca Co., personal fees from Chugai-Roche Co., personal fees from MSD-Merck Co., personal fees from Eli Lilly Co., personal fees from Boehringer-Ingelheim Co., personal fees from Daiichi-Sankyo Co., outside the submitted work. A Nakao, F Igata, R On, T Ikeda, H Yatsugi, R Hirano, T Sasaki, K Tanimura, T Imabayashi, N Tamiya, Y Kaneko, N Nagata, K Watanabe, J Kishimoto, and M Fujita have no conflict of interest to declare.

: The present study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and “Ethical Guidelines for Medical and Health Research Involving Human Subjects”. The study protocol was approved by the ethics committee of each institution participating in this study. This article does not contain any studies with animals performed by any of the authors.

: Patients were given written informed consent forms approved by the Ethics Committees, were fully informed about the study in writing, and then freely signed their consent forms.