Laimas Jonaitis, Gediminas Kiudelis, Paulius Slepavicius, Limas Kupcinskas
Laimas Jonaitis, Gediminas Kiudelis, Paulius Slepavicius, Limas Kupcinskas, Department of Gastroenterology, Medical Academy, Lithuanian University of Health Sciences, LT-50028 Kaunas, Lithuania
Author contributions: Jonaitis L, Kiudelis G and Kupcinskas L designed and planned the study, recruited the patients, collected all the data, and performed all the investigations; Jonaitis L performed statistical analysis; Jonaitis L, Slepavicius P prepared the manuscript; all authors were involved in drafting and revising the manuscript.
Institutional review board statement: The study was reviewed and approved by the Kaunas Regional Biomedical Research Ethics Committee (Protocol No. 8/2011).
Informed consent statement: All study participants, or their legal guardian, provided informed written consent prior to study enrollment.
Conflict-of-interest statement: Laimas Jonaitis, Gediminas Kiudelis, Paulius Slepavicius, Limas Kupcinskas declare that there are no conflicts of interest.
Data sharing statement: Technical appendix, statistical code, and dataset available from the corresponding author at laimasj@takas.lt. Participants gave informed consent for data sharing. No additional data are available.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Laimas Jonaitis, MD, PhD, Department of Gastroenterology, Medical Academy, Lithuanian University of Health Sciences, Eiveniu 2, LT-50028 Kaunas, Lithuania. laimasj@takas.lt
Telephone: +370-37326264 Fax: +370-37331458
Received: May 27, 2015
Peer-review started: May 29, 2015
First decision: June 19, 2015
Revised: August 19, 2015
Accepted: November 30, 2015
Article in press: December 3, 2015
Published online: February 15, 2016
