Longitudinal healthcare use after pediatric brain injury: A population-based birth cohort study

Vincy Chan; Clarissa Serafine Wirianto; Robert Balogh; Michael David Escobar

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0316165

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionSeptember 3, 2024
3 Sep 2024 Author Response 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. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0316165.r001
14 Nov 2024 Decision Letter - Masaki Mogi, Editor PONE-D-24-35301Longitudinal healthcare use after pediatric brain injury: A population-based birth cohort studyPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Chan, 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 Dec 29 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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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. Please update your submission to use the PLOS LaTeX template. The template and more information on our requirements for LaTeX submissions can be found at http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/latex. 3. Thank you for stating in your Funding Statement: Research reported in this publication was supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R03HD104206. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the views of the National Institutes of Health. URL: https://www.nichd.nih.gov/grants-contracts Please provide an amended statement that declares all the funding or sources of support (whether external or internal to your organization) received during this study, as detailed online in our guide for authors at http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submit-now. Please also include the statement “There was no additional external funding received for this study.” in your updated Funding Statement. Please include your amended Funding Statement within your cover letter. We will change the online submission form on your behalf. 4. Thank you for stating the following in the Acknowledgments Section of your manuscript: This study contracted ICES Data & Analytic Sciences (DAS) and used de 314 identified data from the ICES Data Repository, which is managed by ICES with support from its funders and partners: Canada’s Strategy for Patient-Oriented Research (SPOR), the Ontario SPOR Support Unit, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Government of Ontario. The opinions, results and conclusion reported are those of the authors. We note that you have provided funding information that is not currently declared in your Funding Statement. However, funding information should not appear in the Acknowledgments section or other areas of your manuscript. We will only publish funding information present in the Funding Statement section of the online submission form. Please remove any funding-related text from the manuscript and let us know how you would like to update your Funding Statement. Currently, your Funding Statement reads as follows: Research reported in this publication was supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R03HD104206. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the views of the National Institutes of Health. URL: https://www.nichd.nih.gov/grants-contracts Please include your amended statements within your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf. 5. Please note that your Data Availability Statement is currently missing the direct link to access each database. If your manuscript is accepted for publication, you will be asked to provide these details on a very short timeline. We therefore suggest that you provide this information now, though we will not hold up the peer review process if you are unable. 6. We notice that your supplementary table are included in the manuscript file. Please remove them and upload them with the file type 'Supporting Information'. Please ensure that each Supporting Information file has a legend listed in the manuscript after the references list.. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Yes ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes ****** 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: 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 ****** 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: This study examines long-term healthcare use in children (ages 0-4) with traumatic brain injury (TBI) compared to controls. Findings show that TBI-affected children consistently had higher rates of primary care visits, emergency department visits, and hospitalizations. Healthcare use varied by gender, urban/rural location, and socioeconomic factors. While the study presents valuable insights, some points would benefit from further refinement: 1. Some clarification about the random selection approach used to choose 10% of the sample groups is necessary. Please report the specific method utilized for this random selection. Given the potential for variability, different sampling methods or alternative samples could produce divergent results. Future analyses should replicate these results using varied sample selections to improve the validity of the findings. 2. Table 1 could also help to determine whether there are statistical differences between the two groups regarding the sociodemographic variables. Please include some group comparison statistics. 3. It is unclear why specific exclusion criteria, such as comorbid conditions (e.g., epilepsy, autism), are absent. Including these criteria that could significantly influence healthcare utilization would help isolate the specific impact of TBI. 4. While the introduction provides an adequate overview of the study’s context, more information on the neurological impacts of TBI would be useful. In particular, a more comprehensive understanding of why such injuries lead to increased healthcare utilization and the specific challenges this population faces would be beneficial. 5. Consider providing a supplementary table summarizing the healthcare usage rates presented in the results section to make them more accessible for those who prefer data visualization over narrative explanations. 6. In the statistical analysis section, including a mathematical formula used for the calculations would be beneficial. 7. The quality of the figures could be improved, specifically in the resolution. 8. It would be helpful to include more information about the software (e.g., R, Python, SPSS) used for statistical analysis and the computational resources employed during the study. ****** 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: Yes: Emiliano Trimarco ******** [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/ . 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Revision 1
27 Nov 2024 Author Response Responses to Reviewers’ Comments We would like to thank the editor and reviewers for their time and feedback for manuscript. We have addressed your comments below in blue font. Page and line numbers correspond to the simple markup version without tracked changes. Thank you again for your time. We would be happy to address any other comments that arise from a review of the new content. Reviewer #1 This study examines long-term healthcare use in children (ages 0-4) with traumatic brain injury (TBI) compared to controls. Findings show that TBI-affected children consistently had higher rates of primary care visits, emergency department visits, and hospitalizations. Healthcare use varied by gender, urban/rural location, and socioeconomic factors. While the study presents valuable insights, some points would benefit from further refinement: 1. Some clarification about the random selection approach used to choose 10% of the sample groups is necessary. Please report the specific method utilized for this random selection. Given the potential for variability, different sampling methods or alternative samples could produce divergent results. Future analyses should replicate these results using varied sample selections to improve the validity of the findings. We added clarification on the 10% random selection of samples, for which we used a uniform distribution. Please see page 6, line 112. 2. Table 1 could also help to determine whether there are statistical differences between the two groups regarding the sociodemographic variables. Please include some group comparison statistics. We added group comparison statistics in the form of weighted Chi-squared tests between the cohort and each characteristic variable. Please see page 7, lines 131-132 and pages 8-9, Table 1. 3. It is unclear why specific exclusion criteria, such as comorbid conditions (e.g., epilepsy, autism), are absent. Including these criteria that could significantly influence healthcare utilization would help isolate the specific impact of TBI. Thank you for this comment. To date, there is limited longitudinal data that follow children with TBI. The goal of this study is to address this gap and provide foundational data on longitudinal healthcare use. As such, this study explored and compared the overall rates of healthcare use between individuals with an early-life TBI compared to those without an early-life TBI. Future research will include identifying the specific health conditions that contribute to increased healthcare use. 4. While the introduction provides an adequate overview of the study’s context, more information on the neurological impacts of TBI would be useful. In particular, a more comprehensive understanding of why such injuries lead to increased healthcare utilization and the specific challenges this population faces would be beneficial. Supporting literature on the neurological impact of TBIs and their association to increased healthcare utilization is added to the introduction section. Please see page 4, lines 59-63. 5. Consider providing a supplementary table summarizing the healthcare usage rates presented in the results section to make them more accessible for those who prefer data visualization over narrative explanations. We have provided these tables in the supporting information section. Please see S2 Tables. 6. In the statistical analysis section, including a mathematical formula used for the calculations would be beneficial. We added mathematical formulas for rate and confidence interval calculations to the methods section. Please see page 8, lines 140 and 147. 7. The quality of the figures could be improved, specifically in the resolution. We have improved the resolution of the images to 300 DPI and uploaded them as a separate file. 8. It would be helpful to include more information about the software (e.g., R, Python, SPSS) used for statistical analysis and the computational resources employed during the study. We have added the specific computational resources and programs used for analysis to the methods section, principally R and parallel processing. Please see page 7, lines 129-130. Editor 1. When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements. 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 We have updated the manuscript and other files to reflect the PLOS ONE style requirements. 2. Please update your submission to use the PLOS LaTeX template. The template and more information on our requirements for LaTeX submissions can be found at http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/latex. We’ve provided the tracked changes in word format. Please let us know if LaTeX is absolutely required. the LaTeX version did not allow for tracked changes. 3. Thank you for stating in your Funding Statement: Research reported in this publication was supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R03HD104206. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the views of the National Institutes of Health. URL: https://www.nichd.nih.gov/grants-contracts Please provide an amended statement that declares all the funding or sources of support (whether external or internal to your organization) received during this study, as detailed online in our guide for authors at http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submit-now. Please also include the statement “There was no additional external funding received for this study.” in your updated Funding Statement. Please include your amended Funding Statement within your cover letter. We will change the online submission form on your behalf. We have amended our Funding Statement to clarify all sources of funding. We have also included this amended statement in the cover letter. Please see page 17, lines 302-306 of the manuscript. 4. Thank you for stating the following in the Acknowledgments Section of your manuscript: This study contracted ICES Data & Analytic Sciences (DAS) and used de 314 identified data from the ICES Data Repository, which is managed by ICES with support from its funders and partners: Canada’s Strategy for Patient-Oriented Research (SPOR), the Ontario SPOR Support Unit, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Government of Ontario. The opinions, results and conclusion reported are those of the authors. We note that you have provided funding information that is not currently declared in your Funding Statement. However, funding information should not appear in the Acknowledgments section or other areas of your manuscript. We will only publish funding information present in the Funding Statement section of the online submission form. Please remove any funding-related text from the manuscript and let us know how you would like to update your Funding Statement. Currently, your Funding Statement reads as follows: Research reported in this publication was supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R03HD104206. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the views of the National Institutes of Health. URL: https://www.nichd.nih.gov/grants-contracts Please include your amended statements within your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf. We have removed funding information from the acknowledgements. Please see page 17, lines 307-308. 5. Please note that your Data Availability Statement is currently missing the direct link to access each database. If your manuscript is accepted for publication, you will be asked to provide these details on a very short timeline. We therefore suggest that you provide this information now, though we will not hold up the peer review process if you are unable. Our Data Availability Statement notes that data sharing agreements prohibit the dataset from becoming publicly available. We cannot provide a direct link to the dataset. 6. We notice that your supplementary table are included in the manuscript file. Please remove them and upload them with the file type 'Supporting Information'. Please ensure that each Supporting Information file has a legend listed in the manuscript after the references list. We have removed the Supporting Information table, images, and text, and uploaded them separately. We have done the same for Figures in the main body. We hope that these revisions have addressed the Editor’s and Reviewer’s concerns. Once again, we sincerely thank you for your time and efforts in improving our manuscript, and we look forward to your response. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers_R1-20241125.pdf https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0316165.r003
9 Dec 2024 Decision Letter - Masaki Mogi, Editor Longitudinal healthcare use after pediatric brain injury: A population-based birth cohort study PONE-D-24-35301R1 Dear Dr. Chan, 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, Masaki Mogi Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation. Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed ******** 2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Yes ****** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes ****** 4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: No ****** 5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes ****** 6. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: (No Response) ****** 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: Trimarco Emiliano ******** https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0316165.r004
Formally Accepted
Acceptance Letter - Masaki Mogi, Editor PONE-D-24-35301R1 PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Chan, 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. Masaki Mogi Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0316165.r005

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