Peer Review History

Original SubmissionApril 19, 2022
Decision Letter - Roza Chaireti, Editor

PONE-D-22-11504Frequency of complications in a cohort of patients diagnosed with hemophilia A or hemophilia B receiving prophylactic treatment at a health care institution in Colombia: Retrospective noninterventional studyPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Machado-Alba,

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.

lease submit your revised manuscript by 12/3. 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,

Roza Chaireti

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. 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."

3. 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.

4. Thank you for providing the following Funding Statement: 

” yes: Reyes JM, Lourdes M and Castano N are paid employees of Pfizer Colombia. Juan David Wilches-Gutierrez, Diana Rocio Arias-Osorio are paid employees of IPS-Especializada. Andres Gaviria-Mendoza, Natalia Castaño-Gamboa, Luis Fernando Valladales-Restrepo, Manuel E. Machado-Duque and Jorge Machado-Alba are paid employees of Audifarma SA. Harrison David Ospina-Arzuaga do not have any conflict of interest.”

We note that one or more of the authors is affiliated with the funding organization, indicating the funder may have had some role in the design, data collection, analysis or preparation of your manuscript for publication; in other words, the funder played an indirect role through the participation of the co-authors.

If the funding organization did not play a role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript and only provided financial support in the form of authors' salaries and/or research materials, please review your statements relating to the author contributions, and ensure you have specifically and accurately indicated the role(s) that these authors had in your study in the Author Contributions section of the online submission form. Please make any necessary amendments directly within this section of the online submission form.  Please also update your Funding Statement to include the following statement: “The funder provided support in the form of salaries for authors [insert relevant initials], but did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The specific roles of these authors are articulated in the ‘author contributions’ section.”

If the funding organization did have an additional role, please state and explain that role within your Funding Statement.

Please also provide an updated Competing Interests Statement declaring this commercial affiliation along with any other relevant declarations relating to employment, consultancy, patents, products in development, or marketed products, etc. 

Within your Competing Interests Statement, please confirm that this commercial affiliation does not alter your adherence to all PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials by including the following statement: "This does not alter our adherence to  PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.” (as detailed online in our guide for authors http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/competing-interests). If this adherence statement is not accurate and  there are restrictions on sharing of data and/or materials, please state these. Please note that we cannot proceed with consideration of your article until this information has been declared.

5. Your ethics statement should only appear in the Methods section of your manuscript. If your ethics statement is written in any section besides the Methods, please move it to the Methods section and delete it from any other section. Please ensure that your ethics statement is included in your manuscript, as the ethics statement entered into the online submission form will not be published alongside your manuscript.

[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

Reviewer #2: Partly

Reviewer #3: Partly

**********

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

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: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: 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: In their manuscript authors followed a retrospectice cohort, trying to define outcomes of therapy (prophylaxis/ on demand, plasma deriverd/ recombinanat coagulation products) eg: bleeding, inhibitor formation among patients treated between 2012-2019. The manuscript is well written yet showes no novelty and could be improved by additional dAZta collection (eg: mutation type, if available, additional data re emicizumab tretament (approved after 2019). Authors are advised to resubmit into na hemophilia specific journal

Reviewer #2: This manuscript gives an overview a substantial group of patients receiving prophylaxis in Colombia. These real world data give important information about the effectiveness and complications of prophylactic treatment.

I have some suggestions to improve the manuscript.

First of all, for readers not familiair with the Coagulopathies Program of IPS-E (such as myself) it would be helpful to give a short background about te program, who is included, will this lead to selection bias influencing the data?

Minor suggestions:

- I think the proportion of patients receiving plasma-deriverd products is rather high, although lower than 50%. Using the words 'mainly' and 'most frequently' is misleading with such a small difference.

- I would suggest altering the term 'antihemophilic factor' into 'substitution therapy / clotting factor replacement

- bivariate analysis: which variables were investigated?

- Table 1: The column % is not always a percentage

- Table 1 and 2: dose (IU per week) would be more informative if changed into dose/kg/wk

- Please provide data about the number of exposure days before inhibitor develpment occurred

- in the patients with the anaphylactidc reaction, both haemophiliia B patients, was this associated with inhibitor development?

- Table 2: under 'weekly factor dose', what dose ;use of recombinant factors' mean?

- Table 3: 'total of follow up ' what does this mean?

- Table 3: why are patients with bruising admitted to the hospital?

Reviewer #3: General comments

- The topic is important, however, the paper needs revision and further editing.

- All comments are mentioned on the text of the paper.

Specific comments

Title: the suggested title is " The Frequency of complications in a cohort of patients with hemophilia A and B receiving prophylactic treatment in Colombia: a retrospective non-interventional study".

Introduction:

- Line 72; Hemophilia A and B are rare diseases worldwide and not only in Colombia.

- Line 99: Provider needs to be replaced by Institution

Materials and methods:

- Line 110: Does this statement mean that authors stop following patients when they develop inhibitors? If Yes, Why they did not follow them?

- Line 133: Authors need to clarify what they mean by trauma as high percentage of patients had trauma (68%, Table 4).

Results:

- Line 173: the statement needs to be changed as mentioned in the comments.

- The titles of most Tables need to be changed (the suggested titles are mentioned on the manuscript).

- Table 4: This table needs to be reviewed and many details can be mentioned in the text instead, e.g. types of bleeding, trauma and surgeries.

- Line 231: Bivariate analysis; This is very important, it needs to be put in a Table, and only the important findings can be written in the text

Discussion:

- Line 312: Reference 16 needs to be added.

**********

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: L.F.D. van Vulpen

Reviewer #3: Yes: Meaad Kadhum Hassan

**********

[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: PONE-D-22-11504_R.pdf
Attachment
Submitted filename: Comments.pdf
Revision 1

Reference ID: PONE-D-22-11504

Title: The frequency of complications in a cohort of patients diagnosed with hemophilia A and hemophilia B receiving prophylactic treatment in Colombia: a retrospective noninterventional study

Dear editors

PLoS One

We responded to each of the comments made by the editor.

Declarations

Declaration of interests: Reyes JM, Lourdes M and Castaño-Gamboa N are paid employees of Pfizer Colombia; this does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials. Juan David Wilches-Gutierrez, Diana Rocio Arias-Osorio are paid employees of IPS-Especializada. Andres Gaviria-Mendoza, , Luis Fernando Valladales-Restrepo, Manuel E. Machado-Duque and Jorge Machado-Alba are paid employees of Audifarma SA. Harrison David Ospina-Arzuaga do not have any conflict of interest. No other relevant declarations relating to employment, consultancy, patents, products in development, or marketed products.

Funding:

This study was funded by Pfizer Colombia. The funders had role in study design and decision to publish

Author contributions: JEMA participated in the study design, drafting, data collection, data analysis, description of results, discussion, critical revision of the article, and evaluation of the final version of the manuscript. LFVR, AGM, MEMD participated in the study design, drafting, data collection, data analysis, description of results and discussion. HDOA participated in collect information and results. JDWG and DRAO participated in the study design, drafting, and discussion of the article. JMR, NCG and MLN participated in study design and discussion.

Attachments
Attachment
Submitted filename: Response to editor comments.docx
Decision Letter - Roza Chaireti, Editor

The frequency of complications in a cohort of patients diagnosed with hemophilia A and hemophilia B receiving prophylactic treatment in Colombia: a retrospective noninterventional study

PONE-D-22-11504R1

Dear Dr. Machado-Alba,

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. Please note that one of the reviewers has two minor comments (refer to attached file) - you can make the changes when you check the draft.

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,

Roza Chaireti

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 #2: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #3: 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 #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

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

Reviewer #2: I Don't Know

Reviewer #3: 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

Reviewer #3: 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

Reviewer #3: 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: No furter comments, previous comments are adequatly adressed. This manuscript gives a nice overview of the haemophilia patients receiving expensive treatment in a low resource country.

Reviewer #3: Most of the comments were done by the authors. Only 2 comments (in the attached file. minor) need to be corrected.

These are present on the attached file.

Regards

**********

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

Reviewer #3: No

**********

Formally Accepted
Acceptance Letter - Roza Chaireti, Editor

PONE-D-22-11504R1

The frequency of complications in a cohort of patients diagnosed with hemophilia A and hemophilia B receiving prophylactic treatment in Colombia: a retrospective noninterventional study

Dear Dr. Machado Alba:

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. Roza Chaireti

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Open letter on the publication of peer review reports

PLOS recognizes the benefits of transparency in the peer review process. Therefore, we enable the publication of all of the content of peer review and author responses alongside final, published articles. Reviewers remain anonymous, unless they choose to reveal their names.

We encourage other journals to join us in this initiative. We hope that our action inspires the community, including researchers, research funders, and research institutions, to recognize the benefits of published peer review reports for all parts of the research system.

Learn more at ASAPbio .