Associations of metabolic syndrome and metabolically unhealthy obesity with cancer mortality: The Japan Multi-Institutional Collaborative Cohort (J-MICC) study

Tien Van Nguyen; Kokichi Arisawa; Sakurako Katsuura-Kamano; Masashi Ishizu; Mako Nagayoshi; Rieko Okada; Asahi Hishida; Takashi Tamura; Megumi Hara; Keitaro Tanaka; Daisaku Nishimoto; Keiichi Shibuya; Teruhide Koyama; Isao Watanabe; Sadao Suzuki; Takeshi Nishiyama; Kiyonori Kuriki; Yasuyuki Nakamura; Yoshino Saito; Hiroaki Ikezaki; Jun Otonari; Yuriko N. Koyanagi; Keitaro Matsuo; Haruo Mikami; Miho Kusakabe; Kenji Takeuchi; Kenji Wakai

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0269550

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionNovember 12, 2021
24 Jan 2022 Decision Letter - Venkata Naga Srikanth Garikipati, Editor PONE-D-21-35995Associations of metabolic syndrome and metabolically unhealthy obesity with cancer mortality: Results of prospective cohort study in Japanese populationPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Arisawa, 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 Mar 09 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. 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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 include your tables as part of your main manuscript and remove the individual files. Please note that supplementary tables (should remain/ be uploaded) as separate "supporting information" files. 3. 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. 4. We note that the grant information you provided in the ‘Funding Information’ and ‘Financial Disclosure’ sections do not match. When you resubmit, please ensure that you provide the correct grant numbers for the awards you received for your study in the ‘Funding Information’ section. 5. 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. 6. One of the noted authors is a group or consortium “Japan Multi-institutional Collaborative Cohort (J-MICC) Study Group.” In addition to naming the author group, please list the individual authors and affiliations within this group in the acknowledgments section of your manuscript. Please also indicate clearly a lead author for this group along with a contact email address. 7. We note that you have included the phrase “data not shown” in your manuscript. Unfortunately, this does not meet our data sharing requirements. PLOS does not permit references to inaccessible data. We require that authors provide all relevant data within the paper, Supporting Information files, or in an acceptable, public repository. Please add a citation to support this phrase or upload the data that corresponds with these findings to a stable repository (such as Figshare or Dryad) and provide and URLs, DOIs, or accession numbers that may be used to access these data. Or, if the data are not a core part of the research being presented in your study, we ask that you remove the phrase that refers to these data. 8. Please include captions for your Supporting Information files at the end of your manuscript, and update any in-text citations to match accordingly. Please see our Supporting Information guidelines for more information: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/supporting-information. 9. Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice. [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: Yes ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: I Don't Know ****** 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: 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 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 examined the associations of MetS and metabolically unhealthy obesity (MUHO) with cancer mortality in a Japanese population.. Although the finding are potential, reviewer has few concerns: - Table 1 is broken. Reviewer couldn't read the table. - Consult the statistician to confirm the statistical tests used in the study. - Check for the grammar and typo error. - Please report the other medical underlying conditions and how they affect the finding? for instance asthma, diabetes. - What were the other medications, patients were taking? Correlate them with the findings. Reviewer #2: The author aimed to make a correlation with metabolic syndrome and cancer mortality, which in my view was successful. more and more studies of these sort need to be published reviewing the literature which gives a complete overview of the field for future scientists. ****** 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:** Ajay Palagani [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.0269550.r001
Revision 1
15 Mar 2022 Author Response To Editorial Office, PLOS ONE Thank you for your e-mail dated January 24, 2022 and very useful comments raised by the reviewers. We have modified the manuscript according to the comments. The changes and responses to the reviewer’s comments are as follows. We hope that our revised version suitable for publication in the PLOS ONE. Sincerely yours, Kokichi Arisawa, MD, MSc, PhD Department of Preventive Medicine, Tokushima University Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, 3-18-15, Kuramoto-cho, Tokushima 770-8503, Japan （Responses to Editor and Reviewers） 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 The manuscript was modified according to the PLOS One’s style requirements. 2. Please include your tables as part of your main manuscript and remove the individual files. Please note that supplementary tables (should remain/ be uploaded) as separate "supporting information" files. Tables were included as part of the text. Supplementary tables 1 and 2 were attached as supporting information files. 3. 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. In the Methods section, full ethics statement was added, including the names of the IRBs, the numbers, and written informed consent. The research protocol was approved by the ethics committee of Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine (IRB No. 2010-0939-7), Aichi Cancer Center Research Institute (IRB No. 2016- 2-10), Tokushima University Hospital (IRB No. 466-8), and all other institutions participating in J-MICC Study. During the survey, participants were informed that their participation was voluntary and written informed consent was obtained from all participants. 4. We note that the grant information you provided in the ‘Funding Information’ and ‘Financial Disclosure’ sections do not match. When you resubmit, please ensure that you provide the correct grant numbers for the awards you received for your study in the ‘Funding Information’ section. Name and number of grants were added to the Funding Information section. 5. 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. The data used in the present study cannot be made publicly available, because the participants in the J-MICC Study have not given informed consent for public data sharing, and the ethics committee of the Tokushima University Hospital does not approve data sharing. At this time, interested researchers cannot receive access to the data. However, interested researchers can contact the Administration Office of the ethics committee of the Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine (iga-shinsa@adm.nagoya-u.ac.jp). After receiving a request, informed consent from the participants will be sought. 6. One of the noted authors is a group or consortium “Japan Multi-institutional Collaborative Cohort (J-MICC) Study Group.” In addition to naming the author group, please list the individual authors and affiliations within this group in the acknowledgments section of your manuscript. Please also indicate clearly a lead author for this group along with a contact email address. The name of the Japan Multi-Institutional Collaborative Cohort (J-MICC) Study was deleted from the authors. Instead, it was included in the title. 7. We note that you have included the phrase “data not shown” in your manuscript. Unfortunately, this does not meet our data sharing requirements. PLOS does not permit references to inaccessible data. We require that authors provide all relevant data within the paper, Supporting Information files, or in an acceptable, public repository. Please add a citation to support this phrase or upload the data that corresponds with these findings to a stable repository (such as Figshare or Dryad) and provide and URLs, DOIs, or accession numbers that may be used to access these data. Or, if the data are not a core part of the research being presented in your study, we ask that you remove the phrase that refers to these data. Supplementary table 1 was added and the phrase “data not shown” was deleted. 8. Please include captions for your Supporting Information files at the end of your manuscript, and update any in-text citations to match accordingly. Please see our Supporting Information guidelines for more information: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/supporting-information. Captions for supporting information files were added to the end of the text. 9. Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice. Reference list was checked and modified. [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: Yes ________________________________________ 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: I Don't Know ________________________________________ 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: 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 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 examined the associations of MetS and metabolically unhealthy obesity (MUHO) with cancer mortality in a Japanese population.. Although the finding are potential, reviewer has few concerns: - Table 1 is broken. Reviewer couldn't read the table. Table 1 was included in the text. - Consult the statistician to confirm the statistical tests used in the study. Statistical methods used in this paper are commonly used ones, and our research team have sufficient experiences in epidemiologic research. In addition, data analysis was conducted by two independent persons, and it was confirmed that the figures in tables were identical. - Check for the grammar and typo error. The manuscript got English proofreading and errors were corrected. - Please report the other medical underlying conditions and how they affect the finding? for instance asthma, diabetes. - What were the other medications, patients were taking? Correlate them with the findings. Other medications and histories of previous diseases were added to the text and the Table 1. These medications and previous diseases are as expected and may not have strong confounding effects on the results. The proportions of those who had self-reported histories of colorectal polyps, fatty liver, high blood pressure, diabetes and dyslipidemia, and medication for high blood pressure, diabetes, and high blood cholesterol were higher, while histories of chronic gastritis and medication for constipation were less prevalent among participants with MetS than in those without MetS. Reviewer #2: The author aimed to make a correlation with metabolic syndrome and cancer mortality, which in my view was successful. more and more studies of these sort need to be published reviewing the literature which gives a complete overview of the field for future scientists. ________________________________________ Thank you for your positive comments. 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: Ajay Palagani [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: ToEditorialOffice03162022.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0269550.r002
24 May 2022 Decision Letter - Venkata Naga Srikanth Garikipati, Editor Associations of metabolic syndrome and metabolically unhealthy obesity with cancer mortality: The Japan Multi-Institutional Collaborative Cohort (J-MICC) Study PONE-D-21-35995R1 Dear Dr.Arisawa, 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, Venkata Naga Srikanth Garikipati, PhD Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0269550.r003
Formally Accepted
29 Jun 2022 Acceptance Letter - Venkata Naga Srikanth Garikipati, Editor PONE-D-21-35995R1 Associations of metabolic syndrome and metabolically unhealthy obesity with cancer mortality: The Japan Multi-Institutional Collaborative Cohort (J-MICC) Study Dear Dr. Arisawa: 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. Venkata Naga Srikanth Garikipati Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0269550.r004

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