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Article History

Received: 16 July 2024

Accepted: 2 March 2026

First Online: 14 March 2026

Declarations

:

: The authors declare no competing interests.

: This study was approved by the Regional Ethical Review Board Stockholm on 22 June 2016 (Registration number 2016/902 − 31/2) and was, as well as the original REBUS study, performed according to the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments. The REBUS participants gave their written informed consent at the start of the study in 1969–1970. At that time, there was only an advisory ethical committee at Karolinska Institutet and there was no formal ethical application. However, the committee was aware of the study and did not object to it. Several follow-up studies have since been approved and in 1996, the local ethics committee at Karolinska Institutet required that the participants be informed that their data were to be used for studies then and in the future and that they had the right to decline. This was done satisfactorily through advertisements in national papers. The local ethics committee and, after 2004, the Regional Ethical Review Board, have since then considered the participants to have given their consent to future studies. The digitalized data of the participants, including personal identity numbers and the answers from the postal surveys, were sent to the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare for the addition of fracture and alcohol related hospitalization data. The returned data were anonymized and contained no personal identity numbers so the researchers could not identify individual participants.