Time to non-adherence to iron and folic acid supplementation and associated factors among pregnant women in Hosanna town, South Ethiopia: Cox-proportional hazard model

Belay Bancha; Bereket Abrham Lajore; Legese Petros; Habtamu Hassen; Admasu Jemal

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0275086

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionMarch 4, 2022
24 May 2022 Decision Letter - Linglin Xie, Editor PONE-D-22-06567Time to non-adherence of iron folic acid supplementation and associated factors among pregnant women in hosanna town, South Ethiopia: Cox-proportional hazard model.PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Bancha, 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 7/23/2022. 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 provide additional details regarding participant consent. In the ethics statement in the Methods and online submission information, please ensure that you have specified 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. 3. You indicated that you had ethical approval for your study. In your Methods section, please ensure you have also stated whether you obtained consent from parents or guardians of the minors included in the study or whether the research ethics committee or IRB specifically waived the need for their consent [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 ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: 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: 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: 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 manuscript needs details descriptions on certain areas, and a thorough grammatical checks. It has potential to be published if the details can be incorporated especially in the methods and results sections. I have additional comments as follows: Title Suggest changing title to describe clearly it is iron and folic acid. Current title is rather misleading especially the phrasing of “iron folic acid” Abstract - Background could highlights the supplementation nonadherence issues in association to poor pregnancy outcomes - could be better described in terms of brief methods used/factors assessed - use of abbreviation in conclusion when it wasn’t introduced previously anywhere in manuscript should be avoided Introduction - line 67-70: does this definition in reference to also Ethiopian government? - line 73: gap of evidences was not discussed, vaguely stated – as in what was being carried out previously in reference to non-adherence and the associated factors, so the need of the study was not clearly justified - also, tenses in general needs re checking Methods - suggest revising the description of setting to a more relevant information pertaining location - population was not clearly described, especially on the inclusion including age range, trimesters - line 88-90: not clear on which pregnant women were included in the study - suggest changing the use of word kebele for comprehension of wider audience - multisampling can be better visualised with use of flowcharts – suggest to include 1 - line 118-121: vaguely described the tools used – detailed explanation required - operational definitions – arrangement of this information is out of place, with no references to which definitions were referred to - data QA was carried out, but all the information provided were not described as part of the tools used, so this information makes no sense - data analyses were described in details, however it was difficult to follow when tools used/factors assessed were not adequately described Results - line 179 suggest to remove under the study - line 181 missing % - readers could understand better of wealth index status if this was described in methods clearly - figure 1 - and 2 – wrongly spelled education, labelled incorrectly in terms of numbers, and don’t see the need for including the histogram on reasons why women skipped supplementation when this could be presented in just tables - maternal characteristics can be described under study population background - results were not described adequately before the presentation of findings from analyses eg; descriptive of each of the factors Discussion - line 255- 259 were repetitions from previous sections – suggest to remove - line 259 suggest to replace word “witnessed” - line 261: median time was first mentioned in discussion not in results where it should be clearly presented as this would be the primary outcome? - should include wide range of supporting literatures, and include the mechanism explanation to reason the findings observed ****** 6. 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Revision 1
8 Jul 2022 Author Response Dear Reviewers, it is our great pleasure to mention that your comments and corrections are very valuable for further progress to this paper. Following, we are mentioning some important responses and amendments as per comments and adhering to the journal guideline • Iron and folic acid supplementation recommendation and definition also holds true in Ethiopian government • In the manuscript we have mentioned that all pregnant women who booked for ANC one-week prior the study were included and also exclusion mentioned. • The Administrative structure in Ethiopia includes “kebele” for which we couldn’t find the corresponding English analogue and considering this we mentioned that it is a least administrative structure • For tools and factors assessed we are supplementing it with the tool we have used in the study. • We believed that line 229–235 best fits in methods, we've relocated it to the section under the subheading of “Data Processing and Analysis”. • We have made the data set and tools used available in this version. • For others we did all the effort to adhere to the journal guideline and recommendations proposed by the authors. The revised version is submitted in with a track change and also without track change. Hope that this revised version will satisfy the journal standard. Thanks in advance https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0275086.r002
31 Aug 2022 Decision Letter - Linglin Xie, Editor PONE-D-22-06567R1Time to non-adherence to iron and folic acid supplementation and associated factors among pregnant women in Hosanna town, South Ethiopia: Cox-proportional hazard model.PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Bancha, 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 Oct 15 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, Linglin Xie Academic Editor PLOS ONE Journal Requirements: 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. 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 #2: (No Response) ******** 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 #2: Yes ****** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 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 #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 #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 #2: - Suggestion to be consistent with using the survival time to non-adherence or just tome to non-adherence. - Was other pregnancy related condition captured in this study such as GDM or history of GDM, hypertension etc? Just wondering whether this could have any effect on adherence. - What is the exclusion criteria? ****** 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 #2: 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. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0275086.r003
Revision 2
5 Sep 2022 Author Response Dear editor/reviewers, We acknowledge all the concerns and we took a big lesson during the revision of our manuscript. Following this, here are point by point responses to the concerns. Line number that we are using in this note is based on the revised “manuscript”. Inconsistent use of terms/phrases: We really appreciate out reviewers’ concern and in the current version we adhered to us “time to non-adherence”. Data collection tool: We acknowledge our respected reviewers’ concern on GDM hypertension and the likes, but our tool didn’t capture issues related to GDM and hypertension, but it has captured data related to history of adverse fetal outcomes (abortion, still birth, LBW, preterm birth), but these have not shown statistical significance association with our primary outcome both in crude and adjusted model. Data was also collected on reported anemia in the current pregnancy, which has significant association with time to non-adherence in crude analysis but not in adjusted model. We have described these variables under the subheading of “Pregnancy related conditions (line # 231-234) and discussion section (line # 330-331). Exclusion inclusion: Even though we didn’t state this in as separate subheading, we mentioned excusing and inclusion criteria under the subheading of “Study design and population” (line # 91-95), given that the submission guideline doesn’t recommend separate subheading to this section line. Tabele1: we made certain corrections in table 1 (e.g. digits, bracket type…) Citations and referencing: In accordance to the reviewers' concerns, we searched for more references (#30 and 33) to strengthen the discussion. We evaluated lists of the references in both our first and revised versions of the work, but we were unable to obtain a retracted reference. We learned that the reference #1 in the previous versions was not in PubMed database and we suspected the article is not from indexed publisher; hence we removed it from the list. We used Mendeley Reference Manager to handle our references while revising the text, during which we used various apparatuses (computers). We had to reinstall the reference manager because of some technical issues we encountered throughout this process. This might have caused some alterations to our referencing style. We noticed that some references lacked the URL and name of the journal. We believe that we've fixed the problems with reference and citation in this version. Supplemental Material: We made a minor correction in fig. 1. Hosanna Town added at the top of the figure. In previous submission, cluster of Jalonaramo was Embeded into Bobicho, and this’s corrected in the current version. Font type was also corrected to Arial. Thanks for consideration!! https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0275086.r004
12 Sep 2022 Decision Letter - Linglin Xie, Editor Time to non-adherence to iron and folic acid supplementation and associated factors among pregnant women in Hosanna town, South Ethiopia: Cox-proportional hazard model. PONE-D-22-06567R2 Dear Dr. Bancha, 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, Linglin Xie Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0275086.r005
Formally Accepted
15 Sep 2022 Acceptance Letter - Linglin Xie, Editor PONE-D-22-06567R2 Time to non-adherence to iron and folic acid supplementation and associated factors among pregnant women in Hosanna town, South Ethiopia: Cox-proportional hazard model. Dear Dr. Bancha: 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. Linglin Xie Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0275086.r006

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