Spatial distribution and determinants of the change in pre-lacteal feeding practice over time in Ethiopia: A spatial and multivariate decomposition analysis

Achamyeleh Birhanu Teshale; Misganaw Gebrie Worku; Getayeneh Antehunegn Tesema

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0244574

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionAugust 29, 2020
16 Nov 2020 Decision Letter - Hannah Tappis, Editor PONE-D-20-27150 Spatial distribution and determinants of the change in prelacteal feeding practice in Ethiopia; a spatial and multivariate decomposition analysis PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Teshale, 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. Please submit your revised manuscript by Dec 31 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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Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). 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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: Date 4 November 2019 Dear Editor of BMC Public Health Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to review this important paper. This paper uses pooled data of Ethiopia demography and health surveys with the aims of determining the determinants of pre-lacteal feeding practices in Ethiopia. In addition, the paper investigates the factors which explains the prelacteal practices and depicts the trends of prelacteal feeding practices behavior in Ethiopia. Overall, the paper is interesting as it deals with the prelacteal feeding practices which can explain the current mal-practices and shows future program focus areas. Moreover, Ethiopia is striving to further reduce neonatal and infant mortality rates. The author gives a clear background on the statement of problems. And clearly describe the source of data which is an ideal sources to determine the national estimates. In the result and discussions section the author presents the point estimates, trends and factors influencing behaviors of parents or care givers. Some of the strengths of this manuscript are: • The paper addressed public health important issue. • Uses data from DHS, which are nationally representative cross-sectional surveys • Use proper scientific writings steps • Uses proper statistical analysis • Uses advanced level of English language writing • The results and discussions answer the objective • The conclusion is in line with the objectives and results presented. Best regards, Reviewer #2: Introduction: The starting paragraphs mostly deal with exclusive breastfeeding and delayed breastfeeding. However, this paper deals with prelacteal feeding practices. I would suggest starting introduction with prelacteal feeding and then connect prelacteal feeding with delayed breastfeeding and lack of exclusive breastfeeding. The readers would be interested to get to know about preleacteal to start of introduction. Methods: Method section is well explained. I am just curious that the authors used a number of independent variables i.e. region, residence, perception of distance from the health facility, age, educational level, wealth index, occupation, media exposure, parity, ANC visit, place of delivery, delivery by cesarean section, size of the child at birth, and timing of initiation of breastfeeding and authors ONLY explained two variables in operational definition section. Result The authors presented the results in very details. It is a bit difficult to read and digest the results of all variables. It is also a good idea to just explain your major results and the reader can get the idea of detailed results from the table, and figure and be focused on your major findings. Decrement word is repeatedly used that may be changed to another appropriate word. Discussion: Discussion section can be improved; for example line 303-306 early initiation of breastfeeding is considered the window of opportunity to decrease the prelacteal feeding. It is important to discuss more and cite some relevant studies to improve this practice. The authors empahsized a lot in the introduction section and they did not put weigh in the discussion section. Furthermore, different studies report that Delivery by CS is the major determinant of initiation of prelacteal feeding practices in neonate. This study does not report this. It may be important to explain why? ****** 6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). 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Revision 1
4 Dec 2020 Author Response Date: December 4, 2020 Point by point response to editor and reviewer comments Title: Spatial distribution and determinants of the change in pre-lacteal feeding practice in Ethiopia; a spatial and multivariate decomposition analysis Manuscript number: PONE-D-20-27150 Dear editor and Reviewers: We really thank you for your valuable comments for the betterment of our manuscript. Your concerns and questions as well as suggestions are addressed in the revised manuscript. Response to Editorial comment/journal requirement 1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at Author’s response: The author confirm that the revised manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style. 2. We suggest you thoroughly copyedit your manuscript for language usage, spelling, and grammar Author’s response: We extensively edited the manuscript after consulting our colleagues and language experts who had MA degree in TEAFL (teaching English as foreign language) and who had many years’ experience in the area of literature at University of Gondar. A copy of our manuscript showing the changes is indicated by using track changes (See supporting information file). 3. In statistical methods, please clarify whether you corrected for multiple comparisons- Author’s response: Dear editor we consider it in the revised manuscript. In this study, the trends (overall and per each categories of independent variables) were described in the descriptive analysis. As you know in the decomposition analysis, there are two parts, the endowment and the coefficient parts, and we interpreted and discussed the results separately. Moreover, the spatial analysis was conducted using the recent EDHS (EDHS 2016) data. 4. As part of your revision, please complete and submit a copy of the STROBE checklist, a document that aims to improve reporting and reproducibility of observational studies for purposes of post-publication data analysis and reproducibility: (http://www.strobe-statement.org). Please include your completed checklist as a Supporting Information file. Note that if your paper is accepted for publication, this checklist will be published as part of your article. Author’s response: Thank you. We incorporated the STROBE checklist as supporting information (see supporting information). 5. We note that Figures 4, 5, 6 and 7 in your submission contain map images which may be copyrighted. All PLOS content is published under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which means that the manuscript, images, and Supporting Information files will be freely available online, and any third party is permitted to access, download, copy, distribute, and use these materials in any way, even commercially, with proper attribution. For these reasons, we cannot publish previously copyrighted maps or satellite images created using proprietary data, such as Google software (Google Maps, Street View, and Earth). Author’s response: Thank you for the comment. These figures are not copyrighted from other sources rather they are our findings using Arc-GIS version 10.3 and SaTScan version 9.6 statistical softwares. The shape file of Ethiopia was found in the website https://africaopendata.org/dataset/ethiopia-shapefiles, and then we generate the figures using the GPs (latitude and longitude) data and the outcome variable using ArcGIS version 10.3 and SaTScan version 9.6 statistical softwares. So all the figures are not copyrighted form other source rather we generate using the software. Response to reviewers Reviewer #1: Dear reviewer thank you in advance for reviewing our paper. Reviewer #2: 1. Introduction The starting paragraphs mostly deal with exclusive breastfeeding and delayed breastfeeding. However, this paper deals with pre-lacteal feeding practices. I would suggest starting introduction with pre-lacteal feeding and then connect pre-lacteal feeding with delayed breastfeeding and lack of exclusive breastfeeding. The readers would be interested to get to know about pre-lacteal to start of introduction. Author’s response: Dear reviewer thank you for this important concern you raised. We consider you comment and we bother about pre-lacteal feeding in the introduction/background section. We also indicate the relation of pre-lacteal feeding with delayed breastfeeding and lack of exclusive breastfeeding. 2. Methods Method section is well explained. I am just curious that the authors used a number of independent variables i.e. region, residence, perception of distance from the health facility, age, educational level, wealth index, occupation, media exposure, parity, ANC visit, place of delivery, delivery by cesarean section, size of the child at birth, and timing of initiation of breastfeeding and authors ONLY explained two variables in operational definition section. Author’s response: Thank you for the comment. We operationalized media exposure and size of the child at birth to make them measurable and to indicate how these variables were measured to the international readers. However, the rest of the variables are straightforward and there categories are found in the result section (in the tables). Dear reviewer if you are not convinced we are open to consider your comment again. 3. Result The authors presented the results in very details. It is a bit difficult to read and digest the results of all variables. It is also a good idea to just explain your major results and the reader can get the idea of detailed results from the table, and figure and be focused on your major findings. Decrement word is repeatedly used that may be changed to another appropriate word. Author’s response: Thank you for your constructive comment. We put the major findings by avoiding extra and detailed results in the result section of the revised manuscript. In addition, we consider other words for some repeatedly stated words such as “Decrement”. 4. Discussion Discussion section can be improved; for example line 303-306 early initiation of breastfeeding is considered the window of opportunity to decrease the pre-lacteal feeding. It is important to discuss more and cite some relevant studies to improve this practice. The authors emphasized a lot in the introduction section and they did not put weigh in the discussion section. Furthermore, different studies report that Delivery by CS is the major determinant of initiation of pre-lacteal feeding practices in neonate. This study does not report this. It may be important to explain why? Author’s response: Dear reviewer thank you for the important concern you raised. We consider your comment in the revised manuscript. In addition, Cesarean delivery was not associated with the change in pre-lacteal feeding practice in this study (unlike that of the previous studies) and we put a one paragraph statement reveling the discrepancy, the possible reason and further recommendation on this regard (see the discussion section paragraph 10 line 335-341 ). Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to reviewers(PFP).docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0244574.r002
10 Dec 2020 Decision Letter - Hannah Tappis, Editor PONE-D-20-27150R1 Spatial distribution and determinants of the change in pre-lacteal feeding practice over time in Ethiopia: a spatial and multivariate decomposition analysis PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Teshale, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful review, we feel that while initial reviewer feedback was addressed, additional minor revisions are needed to consider this manuscript for publication. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Please submit your revised manuscript by Jan 24 2021 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. Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript: A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'. A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'. An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'. If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter. If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, Hannah Tappis, DrPH, MPH Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (if provided): * In the Methods section, where operational definitions are presented, it would be prudent to add a sentence similar to that included in the response to reviewer comments, noting that "Other independent variable definitions are self-explanatory" and also citing standard DHS survey modules for further reference. * Figures 1 and 3 are superfluous (though data on regional distributions is relevant and important). Please consider omitting these figures and integrating regional distribution data as a row in Tables 1 and 2 respectively. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] [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.0244574.r003
Revision 2
11 Dec 2020 Author Response Date: December 11, 2020 Response to editor comment Title: Spatial distribution and determinants of the change in pre-lacteal feeding practice over time in Ethiopia: a spatial and multivariate decomposition analysis Manuscript number: PONE-D-20-27150 Dear editor: We really thank you for your valuable comments for the betterment of our manuscript. Your concerns and questions as well as suggestions are addressed in the revised manuscript. Point by point response to editor comment 1. In the Methods section, where operational definitions are presented, it would be prudent to add a sentence similar to that included in the response to reviewer comments, noting "Other independent variable definitions are self-explanatory" and also citing standard DHS survey modules for further reference. Author’s response: We added the sentence and we put the survey module as a reference (See line 120 and 121 of the revised manuscript). 2. Figures 1 and 3 are superfluous (though data on regional distributions is relevant and important). Please consider omitting these figures and integrating regional distribution data as a row in Tables 1 and 2 respectively. Author’s response: Thank you. We consider the comment (see the revised manuscript). Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to reviewer(#2).docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0244574.r004
14 Dec 2020 Decision Letter - Hannah Tappis, Editor Spatial distribution and determinants of the change in pre-lacteal feeding practice over time in Ethiopia: a spatial and multivariate decomposition analysis PONE-D-20-27150R2 Dear Dr. Teshale, 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, Hannah Tappis, DrPH, MPH Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0244574.r005
Formally Accepted
4 Jan 2021 Acceptance Letter - Hannah Tappis, Editor PONE-D-20-27150R2 Spatial distribution and determinants of the change in pre-lacteal feeding practice over time in Ethiopia: a spatial and multivariate decomposition analysis Dear Dr. Teshale: 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. Hannah Tappis Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0244574.r006

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