Seroprevalence and incidence of hepatitis A in Southeast Asia: A systematic review

Gustavo Hernandez-Suarez; Debasish Saha; Kris Lodroño; Phatu Boonmahittisut; Stephanus Taniwijaya; Ashwini Saha; Selim Badur; Yong Poovorawan

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0258659

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionMarch 1, 2021
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Reviewer #1: No ****** 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 conducted a conducted a systematic review to evaluate the existing literature regarding HAV epidemiology, focusing on its incidence and seroprevalence trends in the countries of the Southeast Asian region. This is an important study. Major comments 1) Authors describe five database were used in Method section, however Only Medline is used in Flowchart. Please correct. 2) The authors descripted different publications period criteria between the Methods (January 1st, 1999 to February 15th, 2021) and the Table 1 (January 1999 to December 2019). 3) The objective of the study was focusing on the incidence and prevalence of HAV. The case-control study design was in included in the inclusion criteria. What was authors plan to do with the data from case-control study? 4) In Table 2, additional information on the characteristics of included studies is needed to better understand the results. Authors should consider including information such as study setting (rural, urban, nationwide?), studied population, reported or calculated seroprevalence. The discussion of the results should also consider these characteristics. 5) In Table 3, Reporting HAV endemicity solely based on the most recent survey may be misleading in classifying the country as low or high endemicity. The prevalence depends on the study subjects, setting and period of data collection. 6) The manuscript is unnecessarily long and does not allow for grasping the main points of the research. The authors should write concisely and precisely. Also, Figure 4 does not provide more information for this research. Authors should consider deleting it, or adding information related to the aim of the study. Minor comments 1) In abstract, as authors have divided into different paragraph (Background, Methodology, Conclusion), it is better to mention results in an individual paragraph 2) In the methods: the authors should have screened the biography of all included publication as well. This procedure might help finding more relative publications. 3) The quality of figure 2 and figure 5 are too low to read. 4) In different paragraph of Study characteristics, they have put abbreviations in some cases in some not. It is better to put all the abbreviation together in beginning or end of the article. 5) “Prevalence of HAV” is very confusing. More suitable word, such as “HAV exposure” should be used. ****** 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 [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". 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Revision 1
17 Aug 2021 Author Response Dr. Emily Chenette Editor-in-Chief PLOS One Wavre, June 24, 2021 Subject: Revised submission of manuscript entitled: Seroprevalence and incidence of hepatitis A in Southeast Asia: a systematic review Dear Dr. Chenette, On behalf of my co-authors, I would like to resubmit to your attention the following manuscript for publication in PLOS One as a systematic literature review. This systematic review aims to collect information on hepatitis A virus (HAV) incidence and seroprevalence in select countries in the Southeast Asian region. I acknowledge that all comments received from the peer-review process have been adequately revised as requested by the reviewers. We have provided each of these comments, along with their respective revisions including line and page numbers alongside the revised manuscript. I declare that all authors fulfil the criteria for authorship, have read and approved the current manuscript and agree with its submission to PLOS One. I confirm that this manuscript has not been published elsewhere and is not under consideration by any other journal. On behalf of the authors, I look forward to hearing from you with your decision at your earliest convenience. Kindest regards, Gustavo Hernandez-Suarez To the editors: 1. We would like to confirm that the manuscript meets PLOS ONE’s style requirements. 2. Both the financial disclosure and competing interests state and describe the funding organization and the authors’ affiliation with this organization. These statements can be found in the “additional information” file. 3. Figure 4 (now supplementary Figure 1) has been created for the purpose of this manuscript and does not contain images that may be copyrighted. 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 ________________________________________ 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: No ________________________________________ 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 ________________________________________ 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: No ________________________________________ 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 conducted a conducted a systematic review to evaluate the existing literature regarding HAV epidemiology, focusing on its incidence and seroprevalence trends in the countries of the Southeast Asian region. This is an important study. Major comments 1) Authors describe five database were used in Method section, however Only Medline is used in Flowchart. Please correct. Response: Thank you for highlighting this point. Indeed, we conducted a search of five databases, MEDLINE (via PubMed), Embase, Google Scholar, the Health Research and Development Information Network (HERDIN) from The Philippines and MyJurnal from Malaysia. Among the studies included in this review, all studies were identified in Medline or through a grey literature search. We identified only duplicates among the studies found through searching other databases named above, we have edited the PRISMA flow chart (Fig 1) to describe the search results found on the remaining databases. Line 172, page 10, Fig 1 2) The authors descripted different publications period criteria between the Methods (January 1st, 1999 to February 15th, 2021) and the Table 1 (January 1999 to December 2019). Response: Thank you for your comment, the dates in table 1 (now supplementary Table 1) have been updated accordingly. This was incorrectly mentioned in table 1 as we had updated the search after 2019. 3) The objective of the study was focusing on the incidence and prevalence of HAV. The case-control study design was in included in the inclusion criteria. What was authors plan to do with the data from case-control study? Response: Thank you for your comment. We included case control studies in the eligibility criteria because of two reasons which are as follows: Case control study design is often use for outbreaks investigation and controls might be population based and can provide information on the frequency of past exposure of HAV in the general. One case control was included in this review to describe an outbreak in Indonesia. 4) In Table 2, additional information on the characteristics of included studies is needed to better understand the results. Authors should consider including information such as study setting (rural, urban, nationwide?), studied population, reported or calculated seroprevalence. The discussion of the results should also consider these characteristics. Response: Thank you for your comment. We have edited Table 2 (now Table 1) to include further information on study setting, population and seroprevalence as recommended by the reviewer. These characteristics have also been described in the results section of the text. 5) In Table 3, Reporting HAV endemicity solely based on the most recent survey may be misleading in classifying the country as low or high endemicity. The prevalence depends on the study subjects, setting and period of data collection. Response: Thank you for your comment. We agree with the reviewer that the use of the most recent survey may not accurately describe the hepatitis A virus endemicity level of a country. As a result, we have decided to merge tables 2 and 3 together into one table (now Table 1) and removed the endemicity column from the new table entirely. Furthermore, we have edited the text in the discussion section to reflect the changes to the table 2 (now Table 1) by using words like ‘suggest’ rather than ‘show’ to interpret these results. 6) The manuscript is unnecessarily long and does not allow for grasping the main points of the research. The authors should write concisely and precisely. Also, Figure 4 does not provide more information for this research. Authors should consider deleting it, or adding information related to the aim of the study. Response: Thank you for your comment, we have edited the discussion section by removing certain text regarding a discussion of the risk of bias related to the included publications. This has been adequately described in the ‘risk of bias assessment’ sub-section in the results section. We also strived to reduce any other text throughout the manuscript which we deemed as repetitive or contrary to the point being discussed. Lastly, while PLOS One does not have any word limits for review submissions, the word count for this manuscript after revisions comes to approximately 4000 words excluding tables, figures and references, following the PRISMA guidelines that recommends 5000 word-limit for Systematic Reviews. We acknowledge that the figure 4 (now supplementary Figure 1) was created from scratch by our team and that no copyright conflicts were identified upon its completion. The open source map of Southeast Asia was utilized to highlight the geographical context of the study. The authors found it important to include this figure as it would provide the unspecialized reader with an overview of the region. We have moved this figure to Supplementary Fig 1 and leave this matter to the discretion of the reviewers and journal editors on whether to include this figure or delete it from the manuscript. Minor comments 1) In abstract, as authors have divided into different paragraph (Background, Methodology, Conclusion), it is better to mention results in an individual paragraph Response: Thank you for your suggestion. We have edited the abstract to include a paragraph which reports only the results of this review. This paragraph is now named ‘Results’ as recommended by the reviewer. Line 39, page 3 2) In the methods: the authors should have screened the biography of all included publication as well. This procedure might help finding more relative publications. Response: Thank you for your suggestion. The authors did screen the bibliographies of the publications included in this review, but it was not done systematically. This was because many countries had no other publications besides the ones already included in this review. Only Thailand had additional publications for which a bibliography screening was conducted. Manuscript text was edited in the methods and results sections, respectively. 3) The quality of figure 2 and figure 5 are too low to read. Response: Thank you for highlighting this point. Upon checking the figures for quality standards described in the journal guidelines we can confirm that the figures adhered to the stipulated pixel limits. We have once again tried to provide the figures in a similar format. 4) In different paragraph of Study characteristics, they have put abbreviations in some cases in some not. It is better to put all the abbreviation together in beginning or end of the article. Response: Thank you for your comment, we have revised the complete manuscript text in adherence to the journal guidelines. The guidelines stated that abbreviations must be mentioned in full at first use and only if used more than 3 times in the entire text. 5) “Prevalence of HAV” is very confusing. More suitable word, such as “HAV exposure” should be used. Response: Thank you for your comment. We have edited the manuscript text to ‘’HAV exposure’’ instead of ‘’seroprevalence’’ based on the context of the sentence. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0258659.r002
4 Oct 2021 Decision Letter - Yury E Khudyakov, Editor Seroprevalence and incidence of hepatitis A in Southeast Asia: a systematic review PONE-D-21-06795R1 Dear Dr. Hernandez-Suarez, 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, Yury E Khudyakov, PhD Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0258659.r003
Formally Accepted
19 Nov 2021 Acceptance Letter - Yury E Khudyakov, Editor PONE-D-21-06795R1 Seroprevalence and incidence of hepatitis A in Southeast Asia: a systematic review Dear Dr. Hernandez-Suarez: 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. Yury E Khudyakov Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0258659.r004

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