This indicated there was no requirement for proceeding to a full formal ethics and data protection review by the Usher Research Ethics Group.

Ethics committee approval
The study was sponsored by the University of Edinburgh (reference AC20095). Prior to commencement, the research was subject to the Usher Institute (University of Edinburgh) ethics and data protection oversight process. The ethics and data protection triage and overview self-audit of ethics and data protection issues (completed by EG) confirmed that the proposed research, being secondary analysis of a fully anonymized publicly accessible dataset, posed no foreseeable ethics or data protection risks. This indicated there was no requirement for proceeding to a full formal ethics and data protection review by the Usher Research Ethics Group.

Citation: Gillette E, Boardman JP, Calvert C, John J, Stock SJ (2022) Associations between low Apgar scores and mortality by race in the United States: A cohort study of 6,809,653 infants. PLoS Med 19(7): e1004040. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1004040