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Article History

Received: 17 November 2022

Accepted: 28 June 2023

First Online: 10 July 2023

Declarations

:

: Abeer Omar is the director of office of research affairs in KFSH&RC, and Asim Khogeer is the coordinator of research office on Makkah region. Prof. M. Zuheir AlKawi is the director of research ethics monitoring office. All above mentioned authors have no role in data collection or analysis. Other authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

: The ethical approval was granted from the Research Ethics Committee “REC” of King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Center (KFSHRC) Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Ref# 2191278. The REC waived the requirements of signed consent. Participants’ verbal consent was approved to be obtained from participants through phone calls by utterance of these exact words: I grant consent as a voluntary contributor to this research study. The process of obtaining verbal consent was documented in the Investigator’s file and kept for auditing purposes, and all methods were carried out in accordance with relevant guidelines and regulations. Another approval was sought from National Committee of Bioethics (NCBE), the regulatory body of all IRBs in Saudi Arabia and they considered as decision-makers in this issue. All communications were conducted through official e-mails and saved for auditing purposes. KFSHRC Ethics Committee has reviewed and ethically cleared the final study results.

: Not applicable.