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Article History

Received: 17 September 2025

Accepted: 18 December 2025

First Online: 6 January 2026

Declarations

:

: The SHARE study is subject to continuous ethics review. During Waves 1 to 4, SHARE was reviewed and approved by the Ethics Committee of the University of Mannheim. Wave 4 of SHARE and the continuation of the project were reviewed and approved by the Ethics Council of the Max Planck Society. Numerous approvals and votes by other ethics committees in the participating SHARE countries have confirmed the project to be compliant with relevant legal, especially statutory norms, as well as with research-ethical guidelines, e.g., the set of ethical principles regarding human experimentation developed for the medical community by the World Medical Association (Declaration of Helsinki, last revised at the 64th WMA Meeting held in Fortalezza/Brazil in October 2013). For more details please see: .Verbal consent, emphasizing the voluntary nature of participation and the confidentiality of data (e.g. researchers have no access to information that could identify individual participants during or after data collection), was obtained from all participants.

: Not applicable.

: The authors declare no competing interests.