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Article History

Received: 24 June 2025

Accepted: 11 November 2025

First Online: 29 December 2025

Declarations

:

: The authors complied with the ethical standards of the relevant national and institutional committee on human experimentation and with the Declaration of Helsinki of 1975, as revised in 2013. The study was approved by the institutional review board of the Department of Medical, Oral and Biotechnological Sciences, of the University ‘G. d’ Annunzio’ of Chieti-Pescara (Chieti, Italy) and data security was ensured by the pseudo-anonymization of identification codes from regional healthcare databases. No patients were personally identifiable at any time during the entire study period. Privacy-by-design (or data protection-by-design) principles were adopted in this study [ ].According to the rules from the Italian Medicines Agency retrospective studies without direct contact with patients do not need a written consent to process personal data when they are used for research aims. However, a more comprehensive overview of ‘privacy research by design’ can be found in existing literature [ ].

: Not applicable.

: The authors declare no competing interests.