Visual functions in children with craniopharyngioma at diagnosis: A systematic review

Myrthe A. Nuijts; Nienke Veldhuis; Inge Stegeman; Hanneke M. van Santen; Giorgio L. Porro; Saskia M. Imhof; Antoinette Y. N. Schouten–van Meeteren

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0240016

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionMay 27, 2020
24 Aug 2020 Decision Letter - Ahmed Awadein, Editor PONE-D-20-13068 Visual function in children with craniopharyngioma at diagnosis: a systematic review. PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Nuijts, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. ============================== ACADEMIC EDITOR: No Comments ============================== Please submit your revised manuscript by Oct 08 2020 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. 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The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 5. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: The authors submitted a manuscript entitled "Visual function in children with craniopharyngioma at diagnosis: a systematic review". They systematically reviewed the literature to provide an extensive overview of the visual function in children with craniopharyngioma at diagnosis in order to estimate the diversity, magnitude and relevance of the problem of visual impairment. Of the 543 potentially relevant articles, 84 studies met their inclusion criteria. Visual impairment at diagnosis was reported in 1041 of 2071 children (50.3%), decreased visual acuity was reported in 546 of 1321 children (41.3%) and visual field defects were reported in 426 of 1111 children (38.3%). Other ophthalmological findings described were fundoscopic (32.5%) and orthoptic abnormalities (12.5%). My comments to the authors are: 1- I suggest that the full title is modified to "Visual functions at diagnosis in children with craniopharyngioma: a systematic review". 2- The running title needs also to be modified to "Visual functions in childhood craniopharyngioma". 3-In the study characteristics, page 9 lines 198-199 "With regard to the included children with CP, 1236 were female and mean age ranged from 0 (39,93) to 23 years", the sentence needs re-phrasing to "As regards to the included children with CP, 1236 were females and the mean age ranged from 0 to 23 years". 4-In the study characteristics page 9, lines 209-210 "To be precise, only 10 studies primarily reported about visual function and/or long-term visual outcomes in children with CP", this sentence also needs re-phrasing to "Precisely only 10 studies reported primarily visual function and/or long term visual outcomes in children with CP". 5-In pages 28-29, lines 289-295: the term visual impairment is vague, could the authors clarify what do they exactly mean by visual impairment? if they mean visual acuity and visual field then this item should be not be mentioned separately. 6-In page 29, visual acuity paragraph the authors mentioned that 53 studies out of 84 studies described visual acuity at diagnosis and only 4 studies referred to visual acuity as BCVA. Is there an explanation for that? How do the authors justify using UCVA and BCVA as a description for visual acuity affection in these children?. Reviewer #2: Nuijts et al. provide a comprehensive overview of the visual function in children with craniopharyngioma at diagnosis. Their manuscript is very well written, innovative and provides important findings for the clinical care of these patients with their very rare disease. I have only one point, which I would like to suggest for revision / additional editing: From a clinical point of view, it is important to know the rate and risk for pathological ophthalmological findings at diagnosis of craniopharymgioma in pediatric patients. BUT it is sometimes difficult to chose the age-appropriate examination / opthalmological test to reach reliable diagnostic results especially in very young children. Could the authors check the reviewed studies, which testing methods were used (and feasible) in different age groups. Perhaps these analyses could lead to a cautious recommendation of what should be done in terms of opthalamological diagnostics at different age periods. ****** 6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: Yes:** Hermann L. Müller [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0240016.r001
Revision 1
7 Sep 2020 Author Response Reviewer 1: 1- I suggest that the full title is modified to "Visual functions at diagnosis in children with craniopharyngioma: a systematic review". - We thank the reviewer for this comment. We agree with the suggested full title. (Page 1, line 4). 2- The running title needs also to be modified to "Visual functions in childhood craniopharyngioma". - We agree with the suggested running title. (Page 1, line 7). 3-In the study characteristics, page 9 lines 198-199 "With regard to the included children with CP, 1236 were female and mean age ranged from 0 (39,93) to 23 years", the sentence needs re-phrasing to "As regards to the included children with CP, 1236 were females and the mean age ranged from 0 to 23 years". - In the revised manuscript, we rephrased this sentence to ‘’With regard to the included children with CP, 1236 were females and the mean age ranged from 0 to 23 years’’. (Page 8, lines 183-185). 4-In the study characteristics page 9, lines 209-210 "To be precise, only 10 studies primarily reported about visual function and/or long-term visual outcomes in children with CP", this sentence also needs re-phrasing to "Precisely only 10 studies reported primarily visual function and/or long term visual outcomes in children with CP". - In the revised manuscript, we rephrased this sentence. (Page 9, lines 195-196). 5-In pages 28-29, lines 289-295: the term visual impairment is vague, could the authors clarify what do they exactly mean by visual impairment? if they mean visual acuity and visual field then this item should be not be mentioned separately. - We thank the reviewer for this comment and we agree that the term visual impairment is vague. Authors frequently reported about the total number of patients with visual impairment in general without describing results of visual acuity and visual field testing. Therefore, we decided to report this data alongside the results of visual acuity and visual field testing. We rephrased this sentence in the results section aiming to clarify what we mean by using the term ‘visual impairment’. (Page 28, lines 276-285). 6-In page 29, visual acuity paragraph the authors mentioned that 53 studies out of 84 studies described visual acuity at diagnosis and only 4 studies referred to visual acuity as BCVA. Is there an explanation for that? How do the authors justify using UCVA and BCVA as a description for visual acuity affection in these children?. - Unfortunately, only in seven of the included studies authors explicitly described that they used BCVA as a description for visual acuity affection. In the other studies, authors only reported ‘visual acuity’ without specifying whether they used BCVA or UCVA. In the revised manuscript, we added a sentence to clarify this and added UCVA to the list of abbreviations. (Page 29, lines 292-294, page 38, lines 511-512). Reviewer 2: 1. I have only one point, which I would like to suggest for revision / additional editing: From a clinical point of view, it is important to know the rate and risk for pathological ophthalmological findings at diagnosis of craniopharymgioma in pediatric patients. BUT it is sometimes difficult to chose the age-appropriate examination / opthalmological test to reach reliable diagnostic results especially in very young children. Could the authors check the reviewed studies, which testing methods were used (and feasible) in different age groups. Perhaps these analyses could lead to a cautious recommendation of what should be done in terms of opthalamological diagnostics at different age periods. - We thank the reviewer for this comment and agree that this is very important to reliably compare results of different studies. Table 3 of our manuscript shows the ophthalmologic testing methods that were used in the different studies (if provided by the authors). Regrettably, it shows that the majority of studies did not report the methods they used for ophthalmologic testing. Therefore, unfortunately we were not able to compare feasibility of testing methods for different age groups due to lacking data. This is outlined in the discussion section (see ‘limitations of the included studies’ and ‘recommendations’). (Page 36, lines 457 – 460, page 37, lines 493-497). Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Reponse to Reviewers.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0240016.r002
18 Sep 2020 Decision Letter - Ahmed Awadein, Editor Visual functions in children with craniopharyngioma at diagnosis: a systematic review. PONE-D-20-13068R1 Dear Dr. Nuijts, We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements. Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication. An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. Kind regards, Ahmed Awadein, MD, Ph.D, FRCS Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0240016.r003
Formally Accepted
22 Sep 2020 Acceptance Letter - Ahmed Awadein, Editor PONE-D-20-13068R1 Visual functions in children with craniopharyngioma at diagnosis: a systematic review. Dear Dr. Nuijts: I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact onepress@plos.org. If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Dr. Ahmed Awadein Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0240016.r004

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