PONE-D-21-11263

Maternal health and health-related behaviours and their associations with child health: evidence from an Australian birth cohort

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Ahmad,

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.

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PLOS ONE

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PONE-D-21-11263R1

Maternal health and health-related behaviours and their associations with child health: evidence from an Australian birth cohort

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Ahmad,

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 Jul 25 2021 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. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://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,

Maria Christine Magnus, MPH

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (if provided):

I apologize for the delay in reaching a decision reagarding your manuscript. This is due to difficulties in getting external reviewers. We have now received comments from two reviewers. They have some major concerns about your manuscript. I therefore ask that you to carefully address these comments before we can reach a final decisiion about your manuscript.

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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: (No Response)

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

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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: Partly

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

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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: (No Response)

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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: No

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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: Manuscript Number: PONE-D-21-11263R1

Title: Maternal health and health-related behaviours and their associations with child health: evidence from an Australian birth cohort

Ahmad et al. conducted a research on a topic of interest entitled "Maternal health and health-related behaviours and their associations with child health: evidence from an Australian birth cohort." The study investigated the association between maternal general health status, mental health and chronic illness conditions, and health-related behaviours during pregnancy and in the first year postdelivery, and three health outcomes during infancy and adolescent periods. I commend the authors for their interesting work on the topic, however, I have the following concerns.

1. LSAC survey recruited infants (aged 0-1) and kindergarten kids (aged 4-5) along with their families in the first Wave (Wave 1) survey conducted in 2004. As the authors indicated those infants included in the first survey became adolescents (aged 12-13) during survey in Wave 7, similarly, kindergarten kids in Wave 1 became adolescents (aged 12-13) in Wave 5 survey conducted in 2012. However, while the present study accessed data LSAC surveys, the authors did not include a cohort of adolescents involved in 2012. This could have been due to that the kindergarten kids cohort database might not have provided information on maternal health status during pregnancy and postpartum period to be applicable for their study. This warrants some discussion in the methods section.

2. Considering the research questions studied in the study, it would be important for the authors to add some discussion related to the power and sample size of the study.

3. It was difficult to comprehend whether all or some of the key exposure variables collected maternal health information at during pregnancy or during the postpartum period in the paper. For example, as the presence of psychological distress for mothers assessed in “the past four weeks” (page 9, line 193), it was unlikely that the measures evaluated maternal mental health conditions to go back to the pregnancy period. Furthermore, the “number of stressful life events” for mothers would have covered time points back to the antepartum period. However, it was confusing when authors presented their results in one hand saying, “Psychological distress in the year after childbirth … (line 275-276) and on the other hand saying “… psychological distress during pregnancy…” (line 308). Please clarify the variables measurement and descriptions in the paper.

4. Despite the authors adjusted for key maternal demographic and birth related confounding variables, they did not provide the distributions of these maternal and birth characteristics so that someone is be able to look the distributions of these confounders in the study population.

5. While the current study provided brief information about the foetal origins of adult diseases that is used to explain some the potential associations between poor foetal health conditions and occurrence of chronic conditions later in life in the introduction section, their discussion was not sufficient to describe the potential mechanism/pathways to explain the associations revealed in their study.

6. It is also worthwhile to set a stage to explain why some of the exposures were more important for outcomes during infancy but not during adolescent period and visa versa.

7. It is also likely that adolescent health outcomes can be affected (confounded) by their health related behaviours and environmental exposures during the adolescent period. However, these potential confounders and how these factors would influence the results presented in the study were not discussed.

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

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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: Gizachew Tessema

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.]

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Attachments

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Maternal health and health-related behaviours and their associations with child health: evidence from an Australian birth cohort

PONE-D-21-11263R2

Dear Dr. Ahmad,

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.

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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,

Maria Christine Magnus, MPH

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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

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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: (No Response)

**********

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

**********

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: Thanks for the authors for responding for my comments. They have addressed my comments adequately. I have no further comments on the paper.

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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: Gizachew Tessema