Effects of far infrared therapy in hemodialysis arterio-venous fistula maturation: A meta-analysis

Chiu-Feng Wu; Tzu-Pei Yeh; Tzu-Chen Lin; Po-Hsiang Huang; Pin-Jui Huang

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0307586

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionJuly 27, 2023
28 Nov 2023 Decision Letter - Ahmet Murt, Editor PONE-D-23-21091Effects of Far Infrared Therapy in Hemodialysis Arterio-Venous Fistula Maturation: A Meta-analysisPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Huang, 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 Jan 12 2024 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript: A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'. A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'. An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'. If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter. If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. 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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 funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript." At this time, please address the following queries: a) Please clarify the sources of funding (financial or material support) for your study. List the grants or organizations that supported your study, including funding received from your institution. b) State what role the funders took in the study. If the funders had no role in your study, please state: “The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.” c) If any authors received a salary from any of your funders, please state which authors and which funders. d) If you did not receive any funding for this study, please state: “The authors received no specific funding for this work.” Please include your amended statements within your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf. 3. We note that you have stated that you will provide repository information for your data at acceptance. Should your manuscript be accepted for publication, we will hold it until you provide the relevant accession numbers or DOIs necessary to access your data. If you wish to make changes to your Data Availability statement, please describe these changes in your cover letter and we will update your Data Availability statement to reflect the information you provide. 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. Additional Editor Comments: In this meta-analysis, authors analyzed possible affect of FIR therapy on AVF maturation. In brief they found that FIR therapy may improve AVF potency. The topic may be of interest to the nephrology readership. However there are metrhological pitfalls that needs to be corrected. For example this important study was not included in the analysis and it's even not mentioned as a reference: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8379732/. I would like to invite authors to re-check their search strategy and re-structure their paper. [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 Reviewer #2: Yes Reviewer #3: Yes ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: No 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: Yes 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: 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: To the authors: I commend you on the quality of your writing. Although I have some reservations about a four-article review, you have done an excellent job with its composition. I believe those interested in infrared technology for AVFs will find this article to be a pleasant read. Best regards, Reviewer #2: Dear Authors I read your manuscript with great interest. Overall idea is good and paper is well established. However I have some major concerns as follows: Meta-analysis should be conducted when a group of studies is sufficiently homogeneous in terms of subjects involved, interventions, and outcomes to provide a meaningful summary. However, it is often appropriate to take a broader perspective in a meta-analysis than in a single clinical trial. The reliability of the conclusion is influenced by factors like the presence of bias, heterogeneity among the studies (PICO), and the overall certainty of the evidence. If there is minimal bias and high certainty in the evidence, the results from these two studies should have the potential to provide a meaningful conclusion. The power analyse should be made Reviewer #3: I congratulate the authors for their efforts. They conducted a successful systematic review and meta-analysis evaluating the effects of FIR treatment on fistula maturity and patency, including four RCTs. I think that the design, methodology and ethical requirements of the study were appropriate and well written. Although the shortcomings of two similar meta-analyses were mentioned in the introduction, I think that this study does not show very different and strong results from the previous two meta-analyses. Please discuss any real strengths and differences from the other two meta-analyses by highlighting them in the discussion section. In addition: - On page 10 line 94, in the sentence (2. Participant Type: ESRD patients diagnosed with CKD and AVF,...), AVF is not a diagnosis but a vascular access route for HD in CKD patients. Please edit this sentence. ****** 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: 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. 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Revision 1
22 Feb 2024 Author Response Responses to Reviewer 1: 1.Comment: To the authors: I commend you on the quality of your writing. Although I have some reservations about a four-article review, you have done an excellent job with its composition. I believe those interested in infrared technology for AVFs will find this article to be a pleasant read. Best regards, Response: We thank the reviewer for giving recognition to this article. Indeed, four-article review had its limitation, such as insufficient sample size and statistically power. We did our best to lower the bias and increase the power of evidence by using random model, standardized data assessment with standardized mean difference, and subgroup analysis. The above information is all included in the section on limitations. We thank the reviewer again for his affirmation of this article. Responses to Reviewer 2: 1.Comment: I read your manuscript with great interest. Overall idea is good and paper is well established. However I have some major concerns as follows: Meta-analysis should be conducted when a group of studies is sufficiently homogeneous in terms of subjects involved, interventions, and outcomes to provide a meaningful summary. However, it is often appropriate to take a broader perspective in a meta-analysis than in a single clinical trial. The reliability of the conclusion is influenced by factors like the presence of bias, heterogeneity among the studies (PICO), and the overall certainty of the evidence. If there is minimal bias and high certainty in the evidence, the results from these two studies should have the potential to provide a meaningful conclusion. The power analysis should be made. Response: We thank the reviewer for pointing out that power of evidence should be carefully evaluated. Throughout all the results, there were three parameters with high heterogeneity, including assessment flow Qa1, Qa2, and Qa4. We use the power analysis through R language (version 4.3.2 for Windows, 79 megabytes, 64 bit) for evaluate the power of evidence. The result of power analysis was listed in the revised manuscript. Responses to Reviewer 3: 1.Comment: I congratulate the authors for their efforts. They conducted a successful systematic review and meta-analysis evaluating the effects of FIR treatment on fistula maturity and patency, including four RCTs. I think that the design, methodology and ethical requirements of the study were appropriate and well written. Although the shortcomings of two similar meta-analyses were mentioned in the introduction, I think that this study does not show very different and strong results from the previous two meta-analyses. Please discuss any real strengths and differences from the other two meta-analyses by highlighting them in the discussion section. In addition: - On page 10 line 94, in the sentence (2. Participant Type: ESRD patients diagnosed with CKD and AVF,...), AVF is not a diagnosis but a vascular access route for HD in CKD patients. Please edit this sentence. Response: We thank the reviewer for pointing out that the strength and difference from the other two meta-analysis were not clear yet. Nevertheless, although those key parameters presented similar outcome, we have mentioned new data in our article, such as access flow at 1,3 and 6 months (Qa1, Qa2, Qa3), which related to the clinical maturation of arterio-venous fistula. Besides, those key parameters were separated in the two meta-analyses (Bashar et al. mentioned AVF patency and surgical intervention for AVF malfunction; Wan et al. mentioned assessment flow < six months or > six months, AVF diameter, AVF patency, AVF occlusion, needling pain), it was hard to figure out whether all of the parameters were statistically significant or not. In our article, we integrated all the parameters mentioned before, and provided our answer in the article. And for the part of addition, we thank the reviewer for pointing out these errors. The reviewer is correct, and we apologize for the inappropriate presentation. We have now deleted the misunderstanding words and change the sentence to " 2. Participant Type: patients diagnosed with CKD or ESRD, and receiving regular HD treatment with AVF " Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0307586.r002
16 May 2024 Decision Letter - Ahmet Murt, Editor PONE-D-23-21091R1Effects of Far Infrared Therapy in Hemodialysis Arterio-Venous Fistula Maturation: A Meta-analysisPLOS ONE Dear Dr.Huang, 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 Jun 30 2024 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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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, Ahmet Murt 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. Additional Editor Comments: In this revised version of the manuscript, our impartial reviewers are generally satisfied with your explanations. However I see that there are some typo and grammar errors. Please correct them (a native speaker helper is recommended). One example: Previous have indicated that the 12th-month unassisted patency after AVF established was 51-72%. Previous studies? or Previously it was? Please check the whole manuscript to have a better language. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation. Reviewer #2: 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: Yes 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: Dear Authors I reviewed the revised version of the manuscript I congratulate to you for successful revision. The paper can be published as is Reviewer #3: I would like to thank the authors for their responses to previous suggestions and for their efforts to improve the manuscript accordingly. ****** 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: Yes: Eyüp Serhat Çalık ******** [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.0307586.r003
Revision 2
29 Jun 2024 Author Response We've checked the grammer and spelling mistakes, and uploaded the revised version to the platform. Thank you very much! Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0307586.r004
9 Jul 2024 Decision Letter - Ahmet Murt, Editor Effects of Far Infrared Therapy in Hemodialysis Arterio-Venous Fistula Maturation: A Meta-analysis PONE-D-23-21091R2 Dear Dr. Huang 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 will be generated when your article is formally accepted. Please note, if your institution has a publishing partnership with PLOS and your article meets the relevant criteria, all or part of your publication costs will be covered. Please make sure your user information is up-to-date by logging into Editorial Manager at Editorial Manager® and clicking the ‘Update My Information' link at the top of the page. If you have any questions relating to publication charges, 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, Ahmet Murt Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): I have no furrther comments. Reviewers' comments: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0307586.r005
Formally Accepted
19 Jul 2024 Acceptance Letter - Ahmet Murt, Editor PONE-D-23-21091R2 PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Huang, 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. Ahmet Murt Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0307586.r006

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