Ito, Jun
Kita, Hirofumi
Fujisawa, Takashi
Article History
Received: 26 July 2017
Accepted: 25 January 2018
First Online: 14 February 2018
Compliance with ethical standards
:
: The authors have declared that no conflict of interest exists.
: All procedures performed in the present study involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the Institutional Review Board of Steel Memorial Hirohata Hospital (IRB Approval No. 2924) and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. This article does not contain any studies with animals performed by any of the authors.
: Since the present study is a retrospective observational study using only past clinical data, it does not involve invasion or intervention. Therefore, document or verbal consent from each study subject is not required. In accordance with “Ethical guidelines for medical and health research involving human subjects (the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology/the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare in Japan, revised in 2017)”, by posting documents at conspicuous places in the hospital, we notified study subjects of study content so that they could easily understand it, and guaranteed opportunities for them to refuse it (opt out). If there was an offer that they would not want to be a subject of the study, we quickly excluded the subject’s data from the analysis and did not use their clinical information in this study.