Takahashi, Yasuhiro http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1363-2870
Kakizaki, Hirohiko
Article History
Received: 3 November 2017
Accepted: 1 February 2018
First Online: 8 February 2018
Compliance with ethical standards
:
: The authors have no conflicting interests related to this manuscript.
: This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of our institution (2016-H273) and adhered to the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki tenets. The IRB granted a waiver of informed consent for this study based on the ethical guidelines for medical and health research involving human subjects established by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology and by the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare. The waiver was granted since the study was a retrospective chart review, not an interventional study, and it would be difficult to obtain consent from patients who had been treated several years prior. Nevertheless, at the request of the IRB, we published an outline of the study, available for public viewing, on the Aichi Medical University website. This also provided patients the opportunity to decline participation; however, none of the patients declined to participate. Personal identifiers were removed from the records prior to data analysis.