About the Authors

Becca S. Feldman

BeccaFe@clalit.org.il

Affiliation Clalit Research Institute, Chief Physician's Office, Clalit Health Services, Tel Aviv, Israel

Chandra J. Cohen-Stavi

Affiliation Clalit Research Institute, Chief Physician's Office, Clalit Health Services, Tel Aviv, Israel

Morton Leibowitz

Affiliations Clalit Research Institute, Chief Physician's Office, Clalit Health Services, Tel Aviv, Israel, Department of Medicine, New York University School of Medicine, New York, New York, United States of America

Moshe B. Hoshen

Affiliation Clalit Research Institute, Chief Physician's Office, Clalit Health Services, Tel Aviv, Israel

Shepherd R. Singer

Affiliation Division of Epidemiology, Israeli Ministry of Health, Jerusalem, Israel

Haim Bitterman

Affiliations Clalit Research Institute, Chief Physician's Office, Clalit Health Services, Tel Aviv, Israel, The Ruth and Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine, Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel

Nicky Lieberman

Affiliation Community Medicine Division, Clalit Health Services, Tel Aviv, Israel

Ran D. Balicer

Affiliations Clalit Research Institute, Chief Physician's Office, Clalit Health Services, Tel Aviv, Israel, Department of Public Health, Faculty of Health Sciences, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel

Competing Interests

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Author Contributions

Conceived and designed the experiments: BSF SRS CJC NL RDB HB. Analyzed the data: MBH SRS CJC ML. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: MBH SRS. Wrote the paper: ML BSF CJC RDB. Clinical adviser: ML. Statistical methods adviser: MBH. Critically reviewed/edited the manuscript: HB NL. Guarantor: RDB.