PONE-D-22-12309Impact of maternal tobacco smoking on childhood obesity in South AfricaPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Simo-Kengne,

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:The topic of the research is important. However it's necessary for this research paper to has accurate scientific revision  and modifications from the authors specially in the method section which needs scientific reformulation and organization under subtitles, also the results section it  needs necessary special attention from the authors  " Table 1 particularly" as well as structure of the discussion must be conducted.The reviewers comments are very helpful to the authors to improve their research paper to be suitable for publication.

==============================

Please submit your revised manuscript by Jul 07 2022 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: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Omnia Samir El Seifi, Professor

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements.

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 

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and 

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf

2. Please provide additional details regarding participant consent. In the ethics statement in the Methods and online submission information, please ensure that you have specified (1) whether consent was informed and (2) what type you obtained (for instance, written or verbal, and if verbal, how it was documented and witnessed). If your study included minors, state whether you obtained consent from parents or guardians. If the need for consent was waived by the ethics committee, please include this information.

If you are reporting a retrospective study of medical records or archived samples, please ensure that you have discussed whether all data were fully anonymized before you accessed them and/or whether the IRB or ethics committee waived the requirement for informed consent. If patients provided informed written consent to have data from their medical records used in research, please include this information.

3.Thank you for stating the following financial disclosure: 

"The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript."

At this time, please address the following queries:

a) Please clarify the sources of funding (financial or material support) for your study. List the grants or organizations that supported your study, including funding received from your institution. 

b) State what role the funders took in the study. If the funders had no role in your study, please state: “The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.”

c) If any authors received a salary from any of your funders, please state which authors and which funders.

d) If you did not receive any funding for this study, please state: “The authors received no specific funding for this work.”

Please include your amended statements within your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf.

4. In your Data Availability statement, you have not specified where the minimal data set underlying the results described in your manuscript can be found. PLOS defines a study's minimal data set as the underlying data used to reach the conclusions drawn in the manuscript and any additional data required to replicate the reported study findings in their entirety. All PLOS journals require that the minimal data set be made fully available. For more information about our data policy, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability.

"Upon re-submitting your revised manuscript, please upload your study’s minimal underlying data set as either Supporting Information files or to a stable, public repository and include the relevant URLs, DOIs, or accession numbers within your revised cover letter. For a list of acceptable repositories, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-recommended-repositories. Any potentially identifying patient information must be fully anonymized.

Important: If there are ethical or legal restrictions to sharing your data publicly, please explain these restrictions in detail. Please see our guidelines for more information on what we consider unacceptable restrictions to publicly sharing data: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-unacceptable-data-access-restrictions. Note that it is not acceptable for the authors to be the sole named individuals responsible for ensuring data access.

We will update your Data Availability statement to reflect the information you provide in your cover letter.

5. Please include your full ethics statement in the ‘Methods’ section of your manuscript file. In your statement, please include the full name of the IRB or ethics committee who approved or waived your study, as well as whether or not you obtained informed written or verbal consent. If consent was waived for your study, please include this information in your statement as well. 

Additional Editor Comments :

The topic of the research is important.  The method section needs scientific reformulation and organization under subtitles, please give the results special attention " Table 1 particularly" as well as structure of the discussion must be conducted.

[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: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

**********

2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: 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). 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

Reviewer #3: No

Reviewer #4: 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: No

Reviewer #3: No

Reviewer #4: 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: - Title - Impact of maternal tobacco smoking on childhood obesity in South Africa - suggestion: Maternal tobacco smoking and childhood obesity: a cohort study

abstract:

- review purpose - this study examines the affiliation... I would suggest to use the word association.

- review Methods: "The link between maternal tobacco consumption and child health was assessed using logistic regression models in which unobserved child characteristics are assumed to be uncorrelated with independent variables. This random effect assumption allows us to control for time-invariant sociodemographic factors in estimating the probability of overweight prevalence in children. " - it does not describe the study design, variables studied, sample size calculation, inclusion and exclusion criteria.

- The results suggest... this is not appropriate to use the term suggest.

- Introduction is fine, although the last sentence that one would expect the objetive: "Therefore, understanding the contributing factors to childhood obesity becomes imperative in addressing overweight-related future public health challenges in South Africa." - it is not very straight forward as an objective - it should be reviewed.

- There are some essential aspects that should be covered in the methods section.

- The description of the result section are very superficial and do not cover the most relevant results

- The first sentence of the discussion is not well presented as you would expect that this sentence should be the main result of the study: "Because the odd ratio bears less meaning with regard to the estimated probability, marginal effects displayed in Table 3 are used for inference."

- This sentence is not clearly presented: "The outcome of the study shows that, as the frequency of

maternal smoking increases, the likelihood for children to have abnormal weight also increases." - it has to be reviewed.

- The discussion is very superficial and needs to compare the results of the present study with the literature.

- No limitation of the study has been presented.

Reviewer #2: Dear authors’ thank you for submitting this nice manuscript.

Here under some comments about your manuscript.

1. Try to summarize and minimize your manuscript introduction part.

2. Write your study design clearly.

3. Your dependent and independent variables are not clearly stated. List them.

4. What is the meaning of Table 1??? It is meaningless, because it is known that computing the mean, sd, minimum and maximum values for categorical variables are impossible. So remove this table, unless revise it.

5. Your results in the table 2 and table 3 are not correctly presented. I think that it is meaningless. Where is the estimates of the parameters? Where is the interpretation of the parameters?

6. General try to re-write your manuscript.

Reviewer #3: Dear author, I attached some of my comments here.

-_You have to put line number for the whole part of your manuscript

Abstract

-You did not included introduction.

-The method part does not include important information like Sample size, sampling technique, study design, the major assumptions checked and the measures of association used.

Methods

-Why you put all portions of the method in one paragraph. It is better to put in different sub-headings.

-Although it is secondary data, for the reader of the paper to be clear you have to elaborate about the sampling method, the way you reach the sample size, data collection tools and procedures.

-What about the inclusion and exclusion criteria, data quality control and ethical assurance?

-You didn’t described about the models (what is included in model1, model2 and model3 and what criteria was used to compare those models and which one is better)

-What measure of association you had used?

Result

-Why did you prefer using mean and standard deviation?

-The variables did not have category

-The tables need full title, which describes about place, person, time and the problem. In addition, above the table you have to describe major things from the table using texts.

- In result section, Interpretation of the finding is mandatory

Discussion

-you did not included the possible justifications

Reviewer #4: The authors conducted a large-scale study examining the association between maternal tobacco use and children's health in South Africa in terms of body weight condition. In general terms the article is clearly stated, well documented, easy to follow.

However, there are some minor issues that the authors could address:

-The introduction presents the scientific background very explanatory, but I think it is necessary that the authors state more clearly in this section the specific objectives and hypotheses.

-I suggest that to reduce the ambiguity of this paper, the authors should present the methods in a structured way, in line with the STROBE Statement for observational studies. Also, in the methods section the authors should present the study design, settings, and participant eligibility criteria. These seem to be missing or are presented ambiguously.

- In the results section, the descriptive statistics presented in Table 1 appear to be incorrect. The authors should present categorical variables as numbers (percentage, confidence interval).

-Regression models should also be explained in more detail, clearly showing unstandardized and standardized regression weights and p-values. Odds ratios could also be presented.

-The discussion summarizes the results, but I think the conclusions are very long. Much of that presented in the conclusions section should be moved to the discussion.

**********

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: Yes: no

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: No

Reviewer #4: 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". 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.

Attachments

Attachment

Submitted filename: comment for plose.docx

Maternal tobacco smoking and childhood obesity in South Africa: A cohort study

PONE-D-22-12309R1

Dear Dr. Simo-Kengne,

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,

Omnia Samir El Seifi, Professor

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

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 #5: 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 #5: Yes

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #5: I Don't Know

**********

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 #5: 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 #5: 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 #5: The authors have revised the manuscript successfully, so I recommend this paper for possible publication.

**********

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 #5: No

**********