The self-management work of food hypersensitivity

Monika Dybdahl Jakobsen; Aud Obstfelder; Tonje Braaten; Birgit Abelsen

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0248181

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionSeptember 11, 2020
3 Dec 2020 Decision Letter - Patrizia Restani, Editor PONE-D-20-28659 The self-management work of food hypersensitivity PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Jacobsen 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 7 January 2021. 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 see http://www.bmj.com/content/340/bmj.c181.long for guidelines on how to de-identify and prepare clinical data for publication. For a list of acceptable repositories, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-recommended-repositories. We will update your Data Availability statement on your behalf to reflect the information you provide. Additional Editor Comments (if provided): Based on the reviewers' comments, the paper is interesting but requires some improvement. It is therefore necessary to review the paper taking into consideration the useful reviewers' suggestions [Note: HTML markup is below. 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: Partly Reviewer #2: Yes ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: N/A ****** 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). 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: No ****** 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: Food hypersensitivity (FH) has received considerable attention in the scientific community in recent years, so a topic as this could be important for scientific community Anyway, the quality of the article needs to be improved in order to be considered for publication in this journal Some recommendations are indicated bellow - it is not usual to find in introduction in one phrase a number of 12 references... with very low description "Studies on FH have focused on several topics, including the epidemiological and medical aspects of FH [3-5], experiences of living with FH [6], and quality of life [7-15]"... - the level of discussion needs to be also improved in order to add more references and to compare more deeply the obtained data - innovation/new added data needs to be underlined in order to increase the importance of the performed study, as well as the associated drawbacks - the conclusion needs to be rewritten underlining the most important findings and also the possible way to implement the obtained results Reviewer #2: I really appreciated this paper describing the efforts made by people with food hypersensitivity, since the subjective perception of diseases is an aspect generally little considered respect to other more objective clinical aspects. Only few points need to be clarified by authors: Line 99: authors should explain why only women were included in the study, despite this aspect is reported as one of the study limitations. Line 149: Please give more details on how the pilot interview was carried out and developed. Line 166: Please clarify whom “she” is referred to and why only one author was involved in the interpretation of data from the interviews. This is a critical aspect since several biases can occur. Line 178: Please add standard deviation of participants' mean age. Line 180: Did the authors find any differences between women with a recent FH diagnosis /symptoms development and those having had a long story of FH in managing the disease? Please add some sentences about this point. In the “results” section a table or a graph reporting the main tasks and findings would make the results more clear. ****** 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
21 Jan 2021 Author Response Patrizia Restani, Ph.D. Academic Editor PLOS ONE 4 January 2021 Dear Editor Thank you for very valuable comments and suggestions, which have contributed to important improvements of our article. We hope you find our changes of the text of sufficient quality and in line with your suggestions. Our answers to each of the reviewers’ comments are listed below. Yours sincerely, Monika Dybdahl Jakobsen Our answers to Reviewer 1 Some recommendations are indicated bellow - it is not usual to find in introduction in one phrase a number of 12 references... with very low description "Studies on FH have focused on several topics, including the epidemiological and medical aspects of FH [3-5], experiences of living with FH [6], and quality of life [7-15]"... Thank you for your valuable recommendations. We have now reformulated the sentence, and we have described the topics of previous research in more detail. The amendments can be found in lines 60-65. - the level of discussion needs to be also improved in order to add more references and to compare more deeply the obtained data. We have now compared our findings concerning the fact that some concealed their restricted diet and FH with previous studies, and we have added references. We have also added a comparison between our findings concerning the participants’ wish not to bother others and former studies, and we have added three references. In addition, we have added information about the importance of being attentive to the workload of managing long-term conditions. References are also added, and the paragraph is of linguistic cases somewhat modified. These amendments can be found in lines 355-358, 375-376 and 391-394. - innovation/new added data needs to be underlined in order to increase the importance of the performed study, as well as the associated drawbacks. With all revisions made, we hope that our revised article more clearly describe what the study contributes with in the introduction and discussion. We have also amended the discussion on the study’s limitations, and these amendments can be found in lines 416-419. We would very much like to keep the paper as short as possible, and hope that the study contributions and limitations are sufficiently described. - the conclusion needs to be rewritten underlining the most important findings and also the possible way to implement the obtained results. We have now rewritten the conclusion and have included the most important findings. We have also written in a clearer way why our findings indicate that diagnostic help from health care services may be significant. The amendments can be found in lines 425-436. Our answers to Reviewer 2 I really appreciated this paper describing the efforts made by people with food hypersensitivity, since the subjective perception of diseases is an aspect generally little considered respect to other more objective clinical aspects. Only few points need to be clarified by authors: Line 99: authors should explain why only women were included in the study, despite this aspect is reported as one of the study limitations. Thank you for your important comments. We agree that subjective perception has been generally little considered. The inclusion of women only was a result of the fact that the present study is part of a project that only includes women. We have included this information in the text, and it can be found in lines 102-104. Line 149: Please give more details on how the pilot interview was carried out and developed. We have now included more details on how the pilot interview was carried out and developed. This information can be found in lines 153-156. Line 166: Please clarify whom “she” is referred to and why only one author was involved in the interpretation of data from the interviews. This is a critical aspect since several biases can occur. Thank you for this very important comment. We have rephrased the sentence to clarify that “she” refers to the first author. Your comment also pointed to the fact that we have not been precise enough in the description of the coauthors’ role in the process of analyzing the data. The coauthors participated in the process of analyzing the data, however only the first author read the raw data. This is now specified. As a result of your comment on biases, we have added a clause (with reference) to the text concerning limitations. In this clause we write that two researchers’ coding of the raw data can contribute to establish the credibility of the coding. These amendments can be found in lines 171-177 and lines 416-419. Line 178: Please add standard deviation of participants' mean age. We agree that a presentation of the variation in age will contribute to a better description of the sample. However, in this qualitative study with a small sample, we suggest to present how many women belonged to each age group (instead of standard deviation), since we mean that this may contribute to a clear/thorough description of the variation in age. You will find these amendments in lines 186-188. Line 180: Did the authors find any differences between women with a recent FH diagnosis /symptoms development and those having had a long story of FH in managing the disease? Please add some sentences about this point. We had not written clear enough that all women described having had FH symptoms for a long time (years or decades). We have now accentuated this, and the amendment can be found in lines 188-189.Moreover, we did not find any differences between women who have had FH symptoms for years and those who had an even longer story of FH. The clear difference was between 1) those who had clarified once and for all which food(s) caused symptoms and 2) women who had not achieved such clarification. In the “results” section a table or a graph reporting the main tasks and findings would make the results more clear. One central finding was that those who had not clarified once and for all which food(s) caused symptoms, described a cycle of repeated tasks to find out what caused symptoms, implement new tentative diets, instruct others in tentative diets, and evaluate these tentative self-management regimens. We have now included a figure (figure 1) that illustrates this finding. The figure title and legend can be found in lines 290-292, and the figure is uploaded separately, which is in line with PLOS ONE’s style requirements. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0248181.r002
22 Feb 2021 Decision Letter - Patrizia Restani, Editor The self-management work of food hypersensitivity PONE-D-20-28659R1 Dear Dr. Jakobsen 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, Patrizia Restani, Ph.D. Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): All comments have been considered and changes are satisfactory Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation. Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed ******** 2. 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 ****** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: N/A ****** 4. 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). 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 ****** 5. 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 ****** 6. 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: Food hypersensitivity (FH) has received considerable attention in the scientific community in recent years, so this article could be important for PlosOne readers The supplementary comments and answers have contributed to improvements of the article Reviewer #2: (No Response) ****** 7. 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: No https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0248181.r003
Formally Accepted
25 Feb 2021 Acceptance Letter - Patrizia Restani, Editor PONE-D-20-28659R1 The self-management work of food hypersensitivity Dear Dr. Jakobsen: 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 Professor Patrizia Restani Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0248181.r004

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