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Article History

Received: 11 June 2024

Accepted: 4 October 2024

First Online: 4 November 2024

Declarations

:

: This study was supported by MSD through a data subscription licence. Rogier Klok and Dominik Lautsch are employees of MSD and are Merck & Co., Inc., Rahway, NJ, USA shareholders. R. James White and Carmine Dario Vizza have received consultancy payments from Merck & Co., Inc. Julia Harley, Mark Small and Megan Scott are full-time employees of Adelphi Real World, an agency which received a subscription fee for data access and analysis.

: The survey was submitted to the Pearl Institutional Review Board, a central institutional review board (IRB), where ethical exemption determination was granted on 02/08/23 (Pearl IRB work order #22-ADRW-131). Data collection was undertaken in line with European Pharmaceutical Marketing Research Association [] guidelines and as such it does not require ethics committee approval. Each survey was performed in full accordance with relevant legislation at the time of data collection, including the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act 1996, [] the Declaration of Helsinki 1964 [], and Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act legislation []. A complete description of the methods of the survey has been previously published and validated [–]. Using a check box, patients provided informed consent for use of their anonymized and aggregated data for research and publication in scientific journals. Data were collected in such a way that patients and physicians could not be identified directly; all data were aggregated and de-identified before receipt.