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Article History

Accepted: 27 February 2023

First Online: 30 March 2023

Declarations

:

: No external funding was used in the preparation of this article. This research received no specific grants from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

: IT, TS, and SK received research funding from Nihon Shinyaku Co. Ltd., Nippon Boehringer Ingelheim Co. Ltd., and Mochida Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd. MK received grants from Actelion, GlaxoSmithKline, Janssen, and Nippon Shinyaku. JN, HS, TN, AS, TW, HO, MS, ST, and RH have no conflicts of interest that are directly relevant to the content of this article.

: The study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of Hokkaido University (022-0030, approved on 9 May, 2022). This study followed the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments.

: Written informed consent was obtained from all patients included in this study.

: Not applicable.

: The datasets generated and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

: Not applicable.

: JN and IT conceived the original study design, collected and analyzed the data, and drafted the manuscript; HS, AS, TN, TS, HO, TW, and MS collected the data and reviewed the manuscript draft; ST analyzed the computed tomography images; RH and MK collected data from patients with systemic sclerosis and reviewed them; and SK supervised the entire study and reviewed the manuscript.