The Editor-in-Chief and the Japanese Association of Rehabilitation Medicine (JARM) have retracted this article. Following concerns raised regarding the publication, JARM established an independent investigation committee. The investigation concluded that the original dataset supporting the findings is unavailable, rendering the results unverifiable. Furthermore, the author did not disclose concurrent submissions of related manuscripts utilizing the same patient cohort to other journals at the time of submission.
This constitutes a breach of the journal’s editorial policies and the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines.