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Article History

Received: 7 August 2018

Accepted: 15 May 2019

First Online: 29 May 2019

Ethics approval and consent to participate

: Data on new cancer cases are collected by health services, which regularly upload them to the databases managed by the Regional Oncologic Registries (ROR). Each ROR was submitted to the Portuguese National Data Protection Commission and to the Ethics Committee of the respective Oncologic Institute. Furthermore, they have clear rules to data transfer for research activities.The databases of deaths are stored in the Statistics Portugal (INE) and are properly anonymous. To access them, researchers must submit the research protocol to the General Directorate of Education and Science Statistics and apply for accreditation. In that request, the investigators declare that they will fulfill the duty of statistical confidentiality. A detailed description of the accreditation process can be found in.As such, this study did not require a new ethical opinion since it did not use primary data, but only anonymized data, aggregated by regional and national entities duly mandated for the collection and availability of these data.

: Not applicable.

: The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

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