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Review
. 2024 Oct 4;3(5):298-311.
doi: 10.1002/hcs2.113. eCollection 2024 Oct.

Reporting ethical approval in case reports and case series in 12 consecutive years: A systematic review

Linh Tran  1 , Vuong Thanh Huan  2 , Luu Lam Thang Tai  3 , Adnan Safi  4 , Moustafa ElBadry Ahmed  5 , Mohamed Osman Algazar  6 , Sedighe Karimzadeh  7 , Nguyen Vinh Khang  8 , Nguyen Hai Nam  9   10 , Zaheer Ahmad Qureshi  11 , Nguyen Lam Vuong  12 , Le Huu Nhat Minh  13   14 , Nguyen Tien Huy  15   16   17
Affiliations
Review

Reporting ethical approval in case reports and case series in 12 consecutive years: A systematic review

Linh Tran et al. Health Care Sci. .

Abstract

Our study describes the reported rate of the Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval, declaration of Helsinki (DoH), and informed consent in the case reports and case series and investigates factors associated with the ethical approval report. We searched PubMed for case reports and case series from 2006 to 2017. Annually, we obtained the first 20 articles of a case report cluster from 20 distinct publications. This analysis initially contained at least 2400 papers, with 100 papers each study design and year. Only 26 (5.4%) of 480 included studies reported IRB approval, DoH approval, and participant informed consent; 58 (12.1%) reported two out of three ethical statements (DoH, informed consent, IRB); and 151 (31.5%) reported only one, leading to nearly 245 studies (51.0%) did not report any ethical approval item. Both clusters mentioned the DoH the least. Only years, ages, ethical item types, and cluster types were associated with ethical reporting practices. This study found the serious under-reporting of ethical practices in both case reports and case series.

Keywords: case report; case series; declaration of Helsinki; ethical approval; informed consent; institutional review board.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
The workflow of the study.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Ethical approval characteristics by year. Twelve‐year trends of ethical statements in case report and case series researches. (a) Case report informed consent obtain; (b) case report institutional review board (IRB) approval; (c) case report declaration of Helsinki (DoH); (d) case series informed consent obtain; (e) case series IRB approval; (f) case series DoH.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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