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Article History

Received: 26 August 2024

Accepted: 4 November 2024

First Online: 13 November 2024

Declarations

:

: Ethical Committee approval for this study is not required by law, since, (1) This study was performed within the legal framework of the Belgian Cancer Registry (BCR). Based on the Coordinated Law of 10 May 2015 (art. 138), BCR has a legal task to collect data on cancer, subject it to quality control, process and analyse it, encrypt and store it, report on it, make it accessible for research and protect it. Within the boundaries of this legal framework BCR is allowed to act without Ethical Committee approval; and (2) This retrospective study does not fall under the Belgian Law of 7 May 2004 regarding experiments on human persons (art. 3,§ 2) and is therefore not subject to Ethical Committee approval under this law either. BCR processes the data in accordance with GDPR and is exempt from the obligation to disclose information to the persons whose data are processed since notification to the data subject is impossible or takes disproportionate effort due to the large number of data subjects; in particular when data are processed for statistical purposes or for historical or scientific research (cfr. Art. 14.5, b. GDPR EU 2016/67).

: Not applicable. Only aggregated data and/or results are shown in this manuscript.

: The authors declare no competing interests.