Predictors and incidence of depression and anxiety in women undergoing infertility treatment: A cross-sectional study

Lingyan Wang; Youyin Tang; Yuyang Wang

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0284414

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionFebruary 15, 2023
20 Mar 2023 Decision Letter - Jacopo Di Giuseppe, Editor PONE-D-23-04196Predictors of depressive and anxiety in women undergoing infertility treatment: a cross-sectional studyPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Wang, 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 May 04 2023 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 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 Reviewer #2: Yes Reviewer #3: Yes ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: I Don't Know Reviewer #2: Yes Reviewer #3: 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: 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 Reviewer #3: 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: TITLE: Depressive should be substituted with depression and this should also be done in the short title ABSTRACT: Lines 24-25 is not clear and should be recasted. In lines 28-29, CAD, PHQ, KMO should all be written in full 1st . The authors should include a summary of how the patients were selected and state the study design here. Lines 39-42, it is not clear if the authors are reporting results and there is not conclusion in the abstract. INTRODUCTION: There are several grammatical errors and wrong use of tenses that make several statement difficult to understand. The statements in the following lines are not clear and should be recasted, 56-58, 58-59, 64-67, 70-72, 74-76, . Line 78 should be --- determining the risk factors---. METHODS: Several grammatical errors and wrong use of tenses. How were the patients selected and how did the authors determine their sample size? The questionnaires should all be referenced. Line 112 should read --- severity , one month prior to the study---- . Who distributed the questionnaires, how were they administered , when and where was this done and what language were they? Under ethical considerations, it is not clear if approval for conduct of the study was given by the ethical review committe and in line 138 , what individual information are the authors referring to? RESULTS: It is not clear in lines 159-160 which differences were statistically significant. DISCUSSION: There is no need to repeat p values or odds ratios that are in the results here. There are also very many grammatical errors and wrong use of tenses that make many sentences difficult to understand. The following sentences should be recast6ed for clarity,; lines 212-213, 216-217, 219-220, 227-229, in 247 what do the authors mean by -- another founding--?. Lines 254-255 and 258-259 are not clear. REFERNCES. The authors should crosscheck the journal title of reference number 2. The following references do not seem complete; 8,9,10,12,17 and 18 Reviewer #2: I suggest to include the incidence in the title because incidence was mentioned as one of the objectives. Discussion the rate (incidence of the anxiety was not discussed. Authors jumped directly to associated factors. Incidence have to be compared with previous studies and to discuss who there is difference between the other studies. I think sleep problem or pattern are not predictors for anxiety and depression but are effects. e,g are manifestation for anxiety and depression. Reviewer #3: The article is an interesting one. The methodology is not detailed enough. For instance, the administration of the questionnaire was not clearly described. I got to know about it in the result section. The authors should do the corrections in the manuscript as suggested before publication. ****** 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: No Reviewer #3: Yes: Habiba Ibrahim Abdullahi ******** [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: REVIEW PLOS ONE.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0284414.r001
Revision 1
25 Mar 2023 Author Response Reviewer #1: (i) TITLE: Depressive should be substituted with depression and this should also be done in the short title Thanks for your suggestion and we appreciated for your carefully review. We have changed this word. (ii) ABSTRACT: Lines 24-25 is not clear and should be recasted. In lines 28-29, CAD, PHQ, KMO should all be written in full 1st. The authors should include a summary of how the patients were selected and state the study design here. Lines 39-42, it is not clear if the authors are reporting results and there is not conclusion in the abstract. Thanks for your suggestions and we appreciated for your carefully review. We have recasted the abstract. And since “the format criteria of PLOs One” the conclusion can be found in the last two paragraph of abstract “Somatic symptoms and poor sleep quality are both the risk factors of anxiety and depression symptoms of infertile woman. And high educated (junior college degree or above) patients are more likely to be complicated with anxiety symptoms, while elderly patients (age>35) are prone to be complicated with depression symptoms.” (iii) INTRODUCTION: There are several grammatical errors and wrong use of tenses that make several statement difficult to understand. The statements in the following lines are not clear and should be recasted, 56-58, 58-59, 64-67, 70-72, 74-76, . Line 78 should be --- determining the risk factors---. Thanks for your questions and suggestions and we appreciated for your carefully review. We have revised our manuscript. (iv) METHODS: Several grammatical errors and wrong use of tenses. How were the patients selected and how did the authors determine their sample size? The questionnaires should all be referenced. Line 112 should read --- severity, one month prior to the study----. Who distributed the questionnaires, how were they administered, when and where was this done and what language were they? Under ethical considerations, it is not clear if approval for conduct of the study was given by the ethical review committee and in line 138, what individual information are the authors referring to? Thanks for your questions and suggestions and we appreciated for your carefully review. We have revised our manuscript. For patient selection, all patients who came to our hospital for infertility counseling during January 2020 to December 2020 were asked to finish the questionnaires and the inclusion and exclusion criteria were shown in the manuscript. EmpowerStats software was used to calculate the sample size of the study. Power analysis of the study were shown in the following table. We chose the lowest hazards ratio (college degrees or above:1.6) to calculate the estimated samples size, and the estimated samples size should be more than 914. Anxiety/No anxiety value Depression/ No depression value Two-sided α 0.05 Two-sided α 0.05 The incidence of anxiety in infertile women 0.252 The incidence of depression in infertile women 0.056 Assuming hazard ratio of Junior college degrees or above 1.6 Assuming hazard ratio of general sleep quality 3.1 Power 90% Power 90% Estimated patients number in this study 914 Estimated patients number in this study 136 The questionnaires were in Chinese format and distributed by a nurse who have obtained a certification of National Psychological Consultant, her name was Lingyan Wang. And all the questionnaires were finished in the infertility counseling department of West China Second Hospital. All the questionnaires were locked down in a special box, and counted every month by Lingyan Wang, Youyin Tang and Yuyang Wang. Written informed consent was waived due to no individual information (such as patient’s name, ID card number, phone number and biometrics identification data) was identified. (v) RESULTS: It is not clear in lines 159-160 which differences were statistically significant. Thanks for your question and we appreciated for your carefully review. In this sentence, we mean to say that the age and education level had significant difference in no anxiety patients. And we add a “” in table 1 to express this statistically difference. (vi) DISCUSSION: There is no need to repeat p values or odds ratios that are in the results here. There are also very many grammatical errors and wrong use of tenses that make many sentences difficult to understand. The following sentences should be recasted for clarity; lines 212-213, 216-217, 219-220, 227-229, in 247 what do the authors mean by -- another founding--?. Lines 254-255 and 258-259 are not clear. Thanks for your question and we appreciated for your carefully review. We have revised our manuscript according to the above questions. (vii) REFERNCES. The authors should crosscheck the journal title of reference number 2. The following references do not seem complete; 8,9,10,12,17 and 18 Thanks for your question and we appreciated for your carefully review. We have checked our references and revised some of them. Reviewer #2: (i) I suggest to include the incidence in the title because incidence was mentioned as one of the objectives. Thanks for your suggestion and we appreciated for your carefully review. We have changed the title. (ii) Discussion the rate (incidence of the anxiety was not discussed. Authors jumped directly to associated factors. Incidence have to be compared with previous studies and to discuss who there is difference between the other studies. Thanks for your suggestion and we appreciated for your carefully review. Actually, we have discussed the incidence of anxiety and depression and compared with previous studies in Line 225-227 in Discussion part. Besides, we added more details of the incidence and adjusted the position of this paragraph. (iii) I think sleep problem or pattern are not predictors for anxiety and depression but are effects. e,g are manifestation for anxiety and depression. Thanks for your question and we appreciated for your carefully review. We agree with your opinion that sleep problem might be manifestation for anxiety and depression. In this study we only want to explain the relationship between sleep problem and anxiety or depression, and we noticed that poor sleep quality patients had a strong association with depression. Therefore, we revised our manuscript according your suggestion. Reviewer #3: (i) The article is an interesting one. The methodology is not detailed enough. For instance, the administration of the questionnaire was not clearly described. I got to know about it in the result section. Thanks for your suggestions and we appreciated for your carefully review. We have revised our manuscript according your suggestion. The administration of the questionnaire were as follows. “The questionnaires were in Chinese format. A nurse (Lingyan Wang) with a National Psychological Consultant certification distributed and retrieved the questionnaires. And all the questionnaires were finished in the infertility counseling department of West China Second Hospital during January 2020 to December 2020. All the questionnaires were locked in a special box that could only be opened by Yuyang Wang. A monthly questionnaire count was performed independently by Lingyan Wang, Youyin Tang, and Yuyang Wang.” Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.docx* https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0284414.r002
30 Mar 2023 Decision Letter - Jacopo Di Giuseppe, Editor Predictors and incidence of depression and anxiety in women undergoing infertility treatment: a cross-sectional study PONE-D-23-04196R1 Dear Dr. Wang, 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, Jacopo Di Giuseppe Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0284414.r003
Formally Accepted
4 Apr 2023 Acceptance Letter - Jacopo Di Giuseppe, Editor PONE-D-23-04196R1 Predictors and incidence of depression and anxiety in women undergoing infertility treatment: a cross-sectional study Dear Dr. Wang: 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 MD Jacopo Di Giuseppe Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0284414.r004

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