Mona Ascha, Sami Abuqayyas, Ibrahim Hanouneh, Laith Alkukhun, Mark Sands, Raed A Dweik, Adriano R Tonelli
Mona Ascha, Department of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland, OH 44195, United States
Sami Abuqayyas, Laith Alkukhun, Department of Internal Medicine, Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland, OH 44195, United States
Ibrahim Hanouneh, Minnesota Gastroenterology, Minneapolis, MN 55114, United States
Mark Sands, Department of Diagnostic Radiology, Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland, OH 44195, United States
Raed A Dweik, Adriano R Tonelli, Department of Pulmonary, Allergy and Critical Care Medicine, Respiratory Institute, Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland, OH 44195, United States
Author contributions: Ascha M participated in writing and critical revision of the manuscript for important intellectual content and final approval of the manuscript submitted; Abuqayyas S participated in interpretation of the results, writing and critical revision of the manuscript for important intellectual content and final approval of the manuscript submitted; Hanouneh I interpretation of the results, writing and critical revision of the manuscript for important intellectual content and final approval of the manuscript submitted; Alkukhun L participated in the data collection, interpretation of the results and critical revision of the manuscript for important intellectual content and final approval of the manuscript submitted; Sands M participated in the interpretation of the results and critical revision of the manuscript for important intellectual content and final approval of the manuscript submitted; Dweik RA participated in the conception of the study, interpretation of the results and critical revision of the manuscript for important intellectual content and final approval of the manuscript submitted; Tonelli AR participated in the conception, design of the study, data analysis, interpretation of the results, writing and critical revision of the manuscript for important intellectual content and final approval of the manuscript submitted.
Institutional review board statement: The study was reviewed and approved by the Cleveland Clinic Foundation Institutional Review Board.
Informed consent statement: Written informed consent was waived for study participants.
Conflict-of-interest statement: None of the authors have significant conflicts of interest with any companies or organization whose products or services may be discussed in this article.
Data sharing statement: Technical appendix, statistical code, and dataset available from the corresponding author at tonella@ccf.org. Participants gave informed consent for data sharing.
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: Adriano R Tonelli, MD, Department of Pulmonary, Allergy and Critical Care Medicine, Respiratory Institute, Cleveland Clinic, 9500 Euclid Avenue A-90, Cleveland, OH 44195, United States.
tonella@ccf.org
Telephone: +1-216-4440812 Fax: +1-216-4456024
Received: December 22, 2015
Peer-review started: December 23, 2015
First decision: January 15, 2016
Revised: January 21, 2016
Accepted: March 14, 2016
Article in press: March 16, 2016
Published online: April 18, 2016
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