Adolescents’ reports of chaos within the family home environment: Investigating associations with lifestyle behaviours and obesity

Andraea Van Hulst; Sujani Jayanetti; Ana Maria Sanson-Rosas; Marie-Josée Harbec; Lisa Kakinami; Tracie A. Barnett; Mélanie Henderson

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0280737

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionMay 31, 2022
4 Aug 2022 Decision Letter - Linglin Xie, Editor PONE-D-22-15790Adolescents’ reports of chaos within the family home environment: investigating associations with lifestyle behaviours and obesityPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Hulst, 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 Sep 18 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. Thank you for stating the following financial disclosure: "The QUALITY study (primary data collection) was funded by grants from CIHR (https://cihr-irsc.gc.ca/e/193.html) (#OHF-69442, #NMD-94067, #MOP-97853, #MOP-119512), HSFC (https://www.heartandstroke.ca) (#PG040291), and FRQS (https://frq.gouv.qc.ca). AVH is LK hold a Fonds de la recherche en santé du Québec (FRQS) Junior 1 award and MH holds a Junior 2 award from the same organization. The secondary analysis presented herein did not receive any funding." Please state what role the funders took in the study. If the funders had no role, please state: ""The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript."" 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We will update your Data Availability statement to reflect the information you provide in your cover letter. 4. 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. [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 ******** 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: 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: In the manuscript, the authors performed comprehensive analyses between household chaos and lifestyle behaviors or obesity in adolescents. Only a negative association with sleep duration among adolescent girls was observed, mainly due to a few intrinsic limitations given the samples being collected. Please refer to the comments below. Major Comment The authors mentioned that household chaos might have a strong influence on the eating habits of young children. Therefore, diet or unhealthy diet due to household chaos might be directly associated with childhood overweight/obesity. Is it not fully considered in the survey? Since there is no strong association between vegetable or fruits intake and CHAOS, I wonder if the definition of diet category is too vague. Measurements like calories (intake) could be potentially important attributes. One problem I have with the study is that the samples have a relatively low to moderate household chaos score on average and this might be the reason for the lack of evidence for associations between chaos and obesity (One of the major limitations of study as the authors mentioned). Would the authors consider adding more samples with higher chaos if available? In addition to those limitations of the samples in this study, I do want to question the robustness of the (or design of) the CHAOS questionnaire. At least based on the outcome, the results do not substantially coalign with the significance of study. Additionally, since the results might be sensitive to income level, have the authors considered collecting data or samples from low-income families? It would be interesting to analyze the proposed threshold of chaos for more evident influences. Minor Comment Please reformat the references and follow the guidelines properly. I noticed some issues, for instance, no URL should be included. ****** 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? 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Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0280737.r001
Revision 1
10 Nov 2022 Author Response Rebuttal Letter to PLOS ONE Manuscript Number: PONE-D-22-15790 Title: Adolescents’ reports of chaos within the family home environment: investigating associations with lifestyle behaviours and obesity Dear Dr. Linglin Xie, We wish to thank the editorial team and reviewers for their helpful comments to the above-mentioned manuscript and are pleased to provide you with a revised manuscript. A detailed response to each comment is provided below. We hope that these revisions will be found suitable for our manuscript to be considered for publication in PLOS ONE. Editorial comments Comment 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 Response: We have reviewed the journal’s style requirements and have made all required changes as per the instructions provided. Comment 2. Thank you for stating the following financial disclosure: "The QUALITY study (primary data collection) was funded by grants from CIHR (https://cihr-irsc.gc.ca/e/193.html) (#OHF-69442, #NMD-94067, #MOP-97853, #MOP-119512), HSFC (https://www.heartandstroke.ca) (#PG040291), and FRQS (https://frq.gouv.qc.ca). AVH is LK hold a Fonds de la recherche en santé du Québec (FRQS) Junior 1 award and MH holds a Junior 2 award from the same organization. The secondary analysis presented herein did not receive any funding." Please state what role the funders took in the study. If the funders had no role, please state: ""The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript."" If this statement is not correct you must amend it as needed. Please include this amended Role of Funder statement in your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf. Response: We have added information on the role of the funders as: “The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.” Comment 3. 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. Response: For ethical reasons, data from study participants cannot be shared openly as they include potential identifying participant information. We commit to making individual participant data from the QUALITY Cohort study that were used in the current analysis available as per the following conditions: Will individual participant data be available (including data dictionaries)? Yes What data in particular will be shared? Individual participant data that underlie the results reported in this article, after de-identification (text, tables, figures, and appendices) What other documents will be available? Study protocol, analytic code When will data be available (start and end dates)? Beginning 3 months and ending 6 months following article publication With whom? Investigators whose proposed use of the data has been approved by the executive committee of the QUALITY cohort For what types of analyses? To replicate findings from the current project By what mechanism will data be made available? Requests should be directed to melanie.henderson.hsj@gmail.com (QUALITY Cohort Study PI); to gain access, data requestors will need to sign a data access agreement Comment 4. 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. Response: We have made the requested changes. Reviewers' comments: Comment 5. Reviewer #1: In the manuscript, the authors performed comprehensive analyses between household chaos and lifestyle behaviors or obesity in adolescents. Only a negative association with sleep duration among adolescent girls was observed, mainly due to a few intrinsic limitations given the samples being collected. Please refer to the comments below. Major Comment: The authors mentioned that household chaos might have a strong influence on the eating habits of young children. Therefore, diet or unhealthy diet due to household chaos might be directly associated with childhood overweight/obesity. Is it not fully considered in the survey? Since there is no strong association between vegetable or fruits intake and CHAOS, I wonder if the definition of diet category is too vague. Measurements like calories (intake) could be potentially important attributes. Response: We thank the reviewer for this comment. Indeed, given the absence of any associations between household chaos with dietary intake as measured by habitual servings of vegetables and fruit, and with obesity as measured by BMI z-score, our data do not support the potential mediating role of vegetable and fruit intake in the association between household chaos and adolescent BMI. As such this was not further investigated. We agree with the reviewer that accurately assessing diet quality is challenging. For this study, we used mean daily servings of vegetables and fruits obtained from three 24-hour diet recalls as an indicator of overall diet quality. Although calorie intake may be an alternative measure, we believe using it as an indicator of diet quality may be problematic. First, measurement error is likely in total calorie intake. In previous work using QUALITY cohort data, we have shown that misreporting of energy intake is common among participants. In particular, BMI z-score was an important predictor of energy intake underreporting (Suissa K, Benedetti A, Henderson M, Gray-Donald K, Paradis G. The Cardiometabolic Risk Profile of Underreporters of Energy Intake Differs from That of Adequate Reporters among Children at Risk of Obesity. J Nutr. 2019 Jan 1;149(1):123-130). Second, total calorie intake is dependent on other variables such as age, sex, physical activity level and weight status. In contrast, recommendations regarding servings of vegetable and fruit intake for adolescents are standard, regardless of these other variables. Third, we opted for vegetable and fruit intake as it has previously been used in Quebec (Canada) as a measure of diet quality (for example: https://statistique.quebec.ca/fr/fichier/enquete-quebecoise-sur-la-sante-des-jeunes-du-secondaire-2016-2017-resultats-de-la-deuxieme-edition-tome-3-la-sante-physique-et-les-habitudes-de-vie-des-jeunes.pdf). Moreover, vegetable and fruit intake has been linked prospectively to more optimal cardiometabolic profiles including in the QUALITY cohort (Van Hulst A, Paradis G, Harnois-Leblanc S, Benedetti A, Drapeau V, Henderson M. Lowering Saturated Fat and Increasing Vegetable and Fruit Intake May Increase Insulin Sensitivity 2 Years Later in Children with a Family History of Obesity. J Nutr. 2018 Nov 1;148(11):1838-1844.) To clarify this, we have added the following sentence in the methods section (clean version lines 196-197) and added a reference to justify our use of vegetable and fruit intake as a measure of diet quality. “Daily average servings of vegetables and fruits intake was considered in this study as an indicator of overall diet quality [43].” Comment 6: One problem I have with the study is that the samples have a relatively low to moderate household chaos score on average and this might be the reason for the lack of evidence for associations between chaos and obesity (One of the major limitations of study as the authors mentioned). Would the authors consider adding more samples with higher chaos if available? Response: Given that this study relies on a secondary data analysis of the 3rd wave of already collected data from the QUALITY cohort, it was not possible to recruit additional participants to this study. However, as mentioned by the reviewer, we acknowledge this limitation extensively in our discussion (clean version lines 287-296). Comment 7: In addition to those limitations of the samples in this study, I do want to question the robustness of the (or design of) the CHAOS questionnaire. At least based on the outcome, the results do not substantially coalign with the significance of study. Response: We agree with this reviewer comment. Although being one of the most widely used tools in published studies on household chaos, its ability to adequately capture we question the validity of the tool’s ability to capture instability, turbulence and disorganisation within the household has been questioned. We refer to this literature in the discussion, notably with regards to the need for measurement tools that better capture the instability dimension of household chaos (clean version lines 309-336). Comment 8: Additionally, since the results might be sensitive to income level, have the authors considered collecting data or samples from low-income families? It would be interesting to analyze the proposed threshold of chaos for more evident influences. Response: As per our response to comment 6, we relied solely on existing data from a Quebec-based cohort study to examine associations between household chaos and lifestyle behaviours/obesity in adolescents. As such, we were not able to add data from low-income families to this specific study. We mention this in the discussion and refer to extant literature that have focused on the household chaos in samples of children and adolescents from lower socio-economic backgrounds (clean version lines 301-308). Comment 9: Minor Comment: Please reformat the references and follow the guidelines properly. I noticed some issues, for instance, no URL should be included. Response: We have made the corrections to the references. We hope that the modifications brought to the manuscript will meet the editorial team and reviewers’ satisfaction and qualify for publication. Sincerely, Andraea Van Hulst, PhD, RN Assistant Professor McGill University Ingram School of Nursing 680 Sherbrooke West, Office 1833 Montreal, QC, Canada H3A 2M7 Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: 2022-11-10 CHAOS in QUALITY_Response to editors.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0280737.r002
9 Jan 2023 Decision Letter - Linglin Xie, Editor Adolescents’ reports of chaos within the family home environment: investigating associations with lifestyle behaviours and obesity PONE-D-22-15790R1 Dear Dr. Hulst, 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: 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 ******** 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 ****** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: 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 #1: 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 ****** 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: The authors have addressed my previous comments with adequate details and explanations. (Minor comment) In the clean version of the revised manuscript, line number seems missing after discussion section. For the new reference 43, please add doi if applicable: doi: 10.1080/10408398.2019.1632258. ****** 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 ******** https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0280737.r003
Formally Accepted
16 Jan 2023 Acceptance Letter - Linglin Xie, Editor PONE-D-22-15790R1 Adolescents’ reports of chaos within the family home environment: investigating associations with lifestyle behaviours and obesity Dear Dr. Van Hulst: 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.0280737.r004

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