Dietary quality and cardiometabolic indicators in the USA: A comparison of the Planetary Health Diet Index, Healthy Eating Index-2015, and Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension

Sarah M. Frank; Lindsay M. Jaacks; Christy L. Avery; Linda S. Adair; Katie Meyer; Donald Rose; Lindsey Smith Taillie

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0296069

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionJune 17, 2023
11 Jul 2023 Decision Letter - Mohammad Reza Mahmoodi, Editor Transfer Alert This paper was transferred from another journal. As a result, its full editorial history (including decision letters, peer reviews and author responses) may not be present. PONE-D-23-16525Dietary quality and cardiometabolic indicators in the USA: A comparison of the Planetary Health Diet Index, Healthy Eating Index-2015, and Dietary Approaches to Stop HypertensionPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Frank, 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. Kindly exert all the suggestions of the reviewers and academic editor of the manuscript so as not to be in the process of re-review or rejection of the manuscript. 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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 Once you have amended this/these statement(s) in the Methods section of the manuscript, please add the same text to the “Ethics Statement” field of the submission form (via “Edit Submission”). For additional information about PLOS ONE ethical requirements for human subjects research, please refer to http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-human-subjects-research. 3. 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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: Partly Reviewer #2: Yes ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: 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: 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 ****** 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: Comments to authors: The main objective of this study was to explore the association between PHDI, HEI, and DASH with cardiometabolic biomarkers. The authors revealed that the association between HEI and DASH with the majority of cardiometabolic biomarkers was stronger than the association between PHDI with cardiometabolic biomarkers. 1. Another very interesting topic that has been addressed by dear authors but not deeply focused on has been socio-economic disparities. Other researchers have shown that the more people deviate from a healthy eating pattern, the more cardiometabolic biomarkers worsen both in people with risk factors such as diabetes and in healthy people. This has been well-established in many studies on food insecurity. In many communities where people are food insecure, their cardiometabolic biomarkers have worsened. In very simple language, food insecurity means insufficiency and imbalance in receiving all food groups in the daily food pattern. 2. Authors should know another point well that all parts of a manuscript/article must follow a certain homogeneity and respond to the main objectives of the study. Therefore, the authors are strongly requested to do the same in the discussion of the manuscript as they showed the correlation difference between the three indicators with selected biomarkers in the results of the study. 3. Another point that the authors know very well is that more than 26 years have been studied on the healthy eating index and more than 20 years on the DASH model, and these two patterns have well proven their role in the nutritional health of the people of a society. Therefore, avoid one-sidedness in the discussion which is the most essential part of the article. 4. The researchers who initially designed, implemented, and presented the healthy eating index and DASH aimed to implement the policies to promote access to healthy diets for vulnerable populations in the US. 5. The strengths and limitations section should be presented in a separate section under the subtitle of “the strengths and limitations” before the conclusion. 6. The last point is that the conclusion at the end of the article should be modified according to the obtained results. Reviewer #2: I would thank the authors for this valuable article. I have some questions: 1- In Table 1, please say why you report the three indices (PHDI, HEI, and DASH) with median (IQR) instead of Mean (SD). 2- In Table 5, You did not report any p-values for linear and logistic regressions. Please add p-values to test whether, for example, high waist circumference risk significantly differs in the three indices. ****** 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 ******** [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.0296069.r001
Revision 1
12 Sep 2023 Author Response 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_affiaffiliat.pdf Thank you. We have followed the example formatting above for the manuscript and for the title page. 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 (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 Once you have amended this/these statement(s) in the Methods section of the manuscript, please add the same text to the “Ethics Statement” field of the submission form (via “Edit Submission”). For additional information about PLOS ONE ethical requirements for human subjects research, please refer to http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-human-subjects-research. Thank you. We have updated the language as follows: “The study protocols of the NHANES are approved by the Research Ethics Review Board at the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) [14]. This is a retrospective study of data that were fully-anonymized before the authors accessed them. Because the de-identified observational data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey are publicly available for download, this study received a determination of Not Human Subjects Research by the Institutional Review Board at [First Author’s Home University]." 3. Please ensure that you include a title page within your main document. Thank you. We have included a title page in the main document and formatted according to the guidelines available at the link provided by the Journal. 4. 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. Thank you for this feedback. The cited results are not a core part of the research being presented in the study and the phrase “data not shown” has been removed. 5. 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. Thank you. We have included the captions for our Supporting Information files at the end of the manuscript. We have additionally uploaded each Supporting Information file individually per the guidelines on the PLOS ONE website. Reviewer #1: Comments to authors: The main objective of this study was to explore the association between PHDI, HEI, and DASH with cardiometabolic biomarkers. The authors revealed that the association between HEI and DASH with the majority of cardiometabolic biomarkers was stronger than the association between PHDI with cardiometabolic biomarkers. 1. Another very interesting topic that has been addressed by dear authors but not deeply focused on has been socio-economic disparities. Other researchers have shown that the more people deviate from a healthy eating pattern, the more cardiometabolic biomarkers worsen both in people with risk factors such as diabetes and in healthy people. This has been well-established in many studies on food insecurity. In many communities where people are food insecure, their cardiometabolic biomarkers have worsened. In very simple language, food insecurity means insufficiency and imbalance in receiving all food groups in the daily food pattern. Thank you for this comment. We wholeheartedly agree that food insecurity contributes to dietary disparities and to poorer cardiometabolic outcomes, particularly for historically disadvantaged populations. An analysis of food insecurity was beyond the scope of the present manuscript. We did find disparities in dietary quality for all three indices (PHDI, HEI-2015, and DASH) by key sociodemographic indicators, including income, education, and race/ethnicity, and reported on these in the results section. In the discussion we talk about the disparities in dietary quality that were observed in our study and that are consistent with dietary disparities that have been documented repeatedly in the literature (lines 331-332). We also mention that these disparities are due to a variety of structural factors that make accessibility and affordability of health food difficult, and that climate change has the potential to exacerbate these disparities (lines 332-339). We then mention that policy solutions are needed to address upstream determinants of health disparities and improve dietary quality (lines 339-341). In this way, we hope that our study contributes to the important conversation about disparities in dietary quality, particularly for historically disadvantaged populations, and adds to the calls for policy solutions to ensure equitable access to healthy diets for all Americans. 2. Authors should know another point well that all parts of a manuscript/article must follow a certain homogeneity and respond to the main objectives of the study. Therefore, the authors are strongly requested to do the same in the discussion of the manuscript as they showed the correlation difference between the three indicators with selected biomarkers in the results of the study. Thank you for this comment. We believe that the discussion does follow a standard manuscript format, as we first summarize our results, then qualitatively compare the indices (which aligns with our descriptive analyses), summarize and discuss the implications of the similar correlations with cardiometabolic (which aligns with our primary objective and main regression analyses), discuss SD (which aligns with our secondary objective), and then move on to strengths and limitations. We have added some language to the discussion to signal which part of the results we are referring to in a given paragraph (e.g. “our descriptive analyses”, “our primary analyses”). Please note that because of the similarities between the indices for our primary results, and because of the sheer quantity of results, we did not use discussion space to go through each biomarker individually. We believe such an approach would have been redundant for a reader and distracting from the other points we raised in the discussion. 3. Another point that the authors know very well is that more than 26 years have been studied on the healthy eating index and more than 20 years on the DASH model, and these two patterns have well proven their role in the nutritional health of the people of a society. Therefore, avoid one-sidedness in the discussion which is the most essential part of the article. Thank you for your comment. We agree with the reviewer that HEI and especially DASH are valuable public health nutrition tools. We spend more time discussing the PHDI since it is a novel index and may not be familiar to readers as HEI or DASH, whose benefits are already well-established. In the revision, we present a more balanced discussion of the three indices in several ways: • First, in the second and third paragraphs that compare PHDI, HEI-2015, and DASH scoring, we have emphasized that we are comparing the PHDI to two well-established ways of measuring healthy diets (lines 284-285). We have also reworded to emphasize “differences” between the dietary indices (lines 295-296) rather than making comparisons of “worse quality” as in the previous version. • Second, we have taken out the sentence “Despite these differences, overall healthy plant-based diets – such as the PHDI - have been associated with lower cardiometabolic risk in a large US-based cohort study [40], suggesting that improved long-term adherence to the PHDI would similarly be associated with decreased cardiometabolic risk over time.” We replaced this sentence with “Despite these differences, all three diets have healthy plant-based options, which have not only been associated with lower cardiometabolic risk in a large US-based cohort study, but also have significant benefits for environmental sustainability [40].” (lines 326-328). • Finally, in the last paragraph of the discussion, we mention that ideal policy solutions “would address upstream determinants of health disparities and would lead to improvements in dietary quality measured by PHDI, HEI-2015, and DASH (lines 339-341).” 4. The researchers who initially designed, implemented, and presented the healthy eating index and DASH aimed to implement the policies to promote access to healthy diets for vulnerable populations in the US. Thank you for this comment. We agree that both HEI and DASH could be leveraged to reduce dietary disparities, and acknowledge in both our Introduction section (lines 75-75) and Discussion section (lines 331-332) that there are well-documented disparities for both of these indices. We further mention that policies could lead to improvements in both HEI and DASH as well as in PHDI (lines 339-341). 5. The strengths and limitations section should be presented in a separate section under the subtitle of “the strengths and limitations” before the conclusion. We appreciate this suggestion. We have delimited “Limitations and strengths” as a subsection under the Results and discussion main heading. Please note that Results and discussion is now one heading rather than two per journal formatting guidelines (available from https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf). 6. The last point is that the conclusion at the end of the article should be modified according to the obtained results. Thank you. We agree with the reviewer’s comment. We have modified the conclusion to first focus on the primary results of the study (i.e., the similar correlations with cardiometabolic indicators) at a high-level, and then have a high-level summary of the need for policy solutions. The conclusion now reads: “Our analysis suggests that sustainability-focused dietary recommendations, which we operationalized using the PHDI, have similar benefits for cardiometabolic risk factors as HEI-2015 and DASH. There is a need for effective policy solutions to support healthy diets overall, and particularly for populations suffering from a high burden of diet-related disease. Including sustainability in dietary guidelines can have environmental co-benefits while promoting population-level cardiometabolic health.” (lines 359-364). Reviewer #2: I would thank the authors for this valuable article. I have some questions: 1- In Table 1, please say why you report the three indices (PHDI, HEI, and DASH) with median (IQR) instead of Mean (SD). Thank you for this comment. We have updated the table to report the mean (SD) of the scores rather than the median (IQR). 2- In Table 5, You did not report any p-values for linear and logistic regressions. Please add p-values to test whether, for example, high waist circumference risk significantly differs in the three indices. Thank you for this comment. We have added columns for the pairwise test of the beta coefficients from each regression model into table 5. We have also added asterisks indicating the difference from zero for each predicted difference provided in table 5, and updated the table legend accordingly. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: ReviewerResponses.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0296069.r002
10 Oct 2023 Decision Letter - Mohammad Reza Mahmoodi, Editor PONE-D-23-16525R1Dietary quality and cardiometabolic indicators in the USA: A comparison of the Planetary Health Diet Index, Healthy Eating Index-2015, and Dietary Approaches to Stop HypertensionPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Frank, 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 Nov 24 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. 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 yellow 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. Please apply the suggestions of the respected reviewer to present the p-values for the logistic regression statistical test in cardiometabolic biomarkers between the three dietary guidelines. The consent of the statistical expert reviewer of your manuscript will be the condition of acceptance of your article. We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, Mohammad Reza Mahmoodi, Ph.D. 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 #1: All comments have been addressed Reviewer #2: 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 Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes 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 #1: Yes 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 #1: Yes 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 #1: (No Response) Reviewer #2: Thank you for your responses to the comments. I ask you for a minor correction to your response. With comment 2 ("In Table 5, You did not report any p-values for linear and logistic regressions. Please add p-values to test whether, for example, high waist circumference risk significantly differs in the three indices.") I want you to perform a test to compare three indices simultaneously not pair-wise comparisons. Notice: I have a statistician's point of view on your results. If it is not necessary to compare these three indices (PHDI, HEI, and DASH) from a nutritional point of view, please do not change Table 5. ****** 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: Yes: Dr. Mohammad Reza Mahmoodi 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.0296069.r003
Revision 2
16 Nov 2023 Author Response Journal comments: Please apply the suggestions of the respected reviewer to present the p-values for the logistic regression statistical test in cardiometabolic biomarkers between the three dietary guidelines. The consent of the statistical expert reviewer of your manuscript will be the condition of acceptance of your article. Statistical expert reviewer comments: With comment 2 ("In Table 5, You did not report any p-values for linear and logistic regressions. Please add p-values to test whether, for example, high waist circumference risk significantly differs in the three indices.") I want you to perform a test to compare three indices simultaneously not pair-wise comparisons. Notice: I have a statistician's point of view on your results. If it is not necessary to compare these three indices (PHDI, HEI, and DASH) from a nutritional point of view, please do not change Table 5 Authors' reply: We thank the reviewer and the journal for their comments and the opportunity to revise the submission. We have now jointly compared the PHDI, HEI-2015, and DASH indices using a Wald test and report a single p-value. These were done for the linear and logistic regression models whose results are reported in Table 5. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: ReviewerResponses.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0296069.r004
6 Dec 2023 Decision Letter - Mohammad Reza Mahmoodi, Editor Dietary quality and cardiometabolic indicators in the USA: A comparison of the Planetary Health Diet Index, Healthy Eating Index-2015, and Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension PONE-D-23-16525R2 Dear Dr. Frank, 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, Mohammad Reza Mahmoodi, Ph.D. 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 ******** 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: I would like to thank to the authors for this valuable study and for their efforts to improve the results by addressing reviewers' comments. ****** 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 ******** https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0296069.r005
Formally Accepted
14 Dec 2023 Acceptance Letter - Mohammad Reza Mahmoodi, Editor PONE-D-23-16525R2 PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Frank, I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now being handed over to our production team. At this stage, our production department will prepare your paper for publication. This includes ensuring the following: * All references, tables, and figures are properly cited * All relevant supporting information is included in the manuscript submission, * There are no issues that prevent the paper from being properly typeset If revisions are needed, the production department will contact you directly to resolve them. If no revisions are needed, you will receive an email when the publication date has been set. At this time, we do not offer pre-publication proofs to authors during production of the accepted work. Please keep in mind that we are working through a large volume of accepted articles, so please give us a few weeks to review your paper and let you know the next and final steps. Lastly, 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 customercare@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. Mohammad Reza Mahmoodi Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0296069.r006

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