Peer Review History

Original SubmissionOctober 27, 2023
Decision Letter - Ramune Jacobsen, Editor

PONE-D-23-33791Prenatal vitamin D levels of immigrant mothers and language, scholastic, coordination and mixed developmental disorders in offspringPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Arrhenius,

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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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Ramune Jacobsen

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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"This research was supported supported by the INVEST Research Flagship Centre/Research Council of Finland (decision number: 345546)."

Please state what role the funders took in the study.  If the funders had no role, please state: "The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript." 

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6. 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 If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references.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 If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.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. 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

Reviewer #4: Yes

**********

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: 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

Reviewer #4: 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

Reviewer #4: 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: what the criteria of low or medium human development index (HDI) line 150

line 158 Coordination disorders are characterized by impaired fine and gross motor coordination development no surgical or accidents matters

line 200 25(OH)D vitamin D or 1, 25 Di (OH) D

vitamin D have role in immunity do you have any results about immunity or disease resistance

Reviewer #2: Prenatal vitamin D levels of immigrant mothers and language, scholastic, coordination and mixed developmental disorders in offspring

Vitamin D deficiency causes health issues not only in children as well in young and old age livings both in human and animals. Prenatal vitamin D levels of immigrant mothers and language, scholastic, coordination and mixed developmental disorders in offspring is an interesting study with respect to immigrant population in Finland. I will suggest few changes in the manuscript before publication. These changes are following:

On line # 84: write full spellings of ADHD as used first time in the text.

On line # 229: Can authors add data of % age of different countries rather than immigrant’s continents having vit D deficiency used in the present study samples?

was there any deficiency of Ca, P etc in immigrants mothers related with the deficiency of vit D?

is there any relationship between the year of migration of immigrant’s mothers, present study and Vit D deficiency?

Need to improve table #02 for readers.

Reviewer #3: I do not like the title of the paper. It needs to be made more precise. Otherwise, the paper is a very good attempt. Methodology is sound. Discussion is extremely comprehensive. Methodology is well detailed.

Reviewer #4: Congrats to the authors on their hard work. It is an original study—the introduction, discussion, and conclusion were well-written and robust statistical analysis performed. I would advise the author to consider enhancing the visual cues by adding more graphics, not just tables.

**********

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: Hamada A. Ahmed

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: No

Reviewer #4: No

**********

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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.

Revision 1

Thank you for providing us with some valuable feedback and comments. We have now revised the manuscript, see below for detailed responses and edits.

A) Editorial comments

When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements.

1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf

Response: we have checked the formatting requirements and modified the manuscript accordingly.

2. We note that the grant information you provided in the ‘Funding Information’ and ‘Financial Disclosure’ sections do not match.

When you resubmit, please ensure that you provide the correct grant numbers for the awards you received for your study in the ‘Funding Information’ section.

Response: the grant information has been checked and corrected accordingly (Academy of Finland and Research Council of Finland are the same organization, this has been clarified now).

Thank you for stating the following financial disclosure:

"This research was supported supported by the INVEST Research Flagship Centre/Research Council of Finland (decision number: 345546)."

Please state what role the funders took in the study. If the funders had no role, please state: "The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript."

If this statement is not correct you must amend it as needed.

Please include this amended Role of Funder statement in your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf.

Response: the role of the funder has been added to the cover letter.

3. We note that you have indicated that data from this study are available upon request. PLOS only allows data to be available upon request if there are legal or ethical restrictions on sharing data publicly. For more information on unacceptable data access restrictions, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-unacceptable-data-access-restrictions.

In your revised cover letter, please address the following prompts:

a) If there are ethical or legal restrictions on sharing a de-identified data set, please explain them in detail (e.g., data contain potentially sensitive information, data are owned by a third-party organization, etc.) and who has imposed them (e.g., an ethics committee). Please also provide contact information for a data access committee, ethics committee, or other institutional body to which data requests may be sent.

b) If there are no restrictions, please upload the minimal anonymized data set necessary to replicate your study findings as either Supporting Information files or to a stable, public repository and provide us with the relevant URLs, DOIs, or accession numbers. For a list of acceptable repositories, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-recommended-repositories.

We will update your Data Availability statement on your behalf to reflect the information you provide.

Response: the legal restrictions that prohibit data sharing have been precised in the cover letter.

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.

Response: We have added S3 Table with the relevant supporting data and removed the phrase “data not shown”.

5. 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.

Response: The reference list has been checked and is correct. No changes were made to the references.

B) Reviewers' comments

Reviewer #1:

1) what the criteria of low or medium human development index (HDI) line 150

Response: Thank you for pointing this out. We have added information on the HDI categorization to the manuscript (page 6, lines 173-177). The reference provided (ref 14) also offers extensive information on the categorization.

2) line 158 Coordination disorders are characterized by impaired fine and gross motor coordination development no surgical or accidents matters

Response: We have added this precision to page 6, line 181.

3) line 200 25(OH)D vitamin D or 1, 25 Di (OH) D

Response: This line was revised accordingly (line 228).

4) vitamin D have role in immunity do you have any results about immunity or disease resistance

Response: Thank you for the suggestion. Unfortunately, we do not have any data on immunological markers for this sample.

Reviewer #2: Prenatal vitamin D levels of immigrant mothers and language, scholastic, coordination and mixed developmental disorders in offspring

Vitamin D deficiency causes health issues not only in children as well in young and old age livings both in human and animals. Prenatal vitamin D levels of immigrant mothers and language, scholastic, coordination and mixed developmental disorders in offspring is an interesting study with respect to immigrant population in Finland. I will suggest few changes in the manuscript before publication. These changes are following:

5) On line # 84: write full spellings of ADHD as used first time in the text.

Response: “attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)” has been added to the text, line 103.

6) On line # 229: Can authors add data of % age of different countries rather than immigrant’s continents having vit D deficiency used in the present study samples?

Response: We did not fully understand this comment. What is meant by “Age of different countries?” However, the S2 Appendix provides a list of all the included immigrant mothers’ birth countries.

7) was there any deficiency of Ca, P etc in immigrants mothers related with the deficiency of vit D?

Response: Thank you for the question. Unfortunately, nor calcium or phosphate were measured from the study subjects’ blood samples.

8) is there any relationship between the year of migration of immigrant’s mothers, present study and Vit D deficiency?

Response: Thank you for the excellent question. We checked this: the time from immigration date to blood draw was not associated with the vitamin D levels among immigrant mothers. We added this to the results, page 10, lines 284-288.

9) Need to improve table #02 for readers.

Response: Thank you for the suggestion. The table has been modified a little bit to be more reader-friendly, but the journal’s requirements prohibit the use of e.g., extra spacing, so the changes were minor. Please suggest more specific revisions to the table if needed.

10) Reviewer #3: I do not like the title of the paper. It needs to be made more precise. Otherwise, the paper is a very good attempt. Methodology is sound. Discussion is extremely comprehensive. Methodology is well detailed.

Response: Thank you for the positive feedback. We changed the title to “Vitamin D levels of pregnant immigrant women and developmental disorders of language, learning and coordination in offspring” We are also open to other suggestions for the title.

11) Reviewer #4: Congrats to the authors on their hard work. It is an original study—the introduction, discussion, and conclusion were well-written and robust statistical analysis performed. I would advise the author to consider enhancing the visual cues by adding more graphics, not just tables.

Response: Thank you for the positive feedback! We have added a figure on the vitamin D level changes before and after the food fortification and recommendation change in Finland in 2003 (Fig 1).

Attachments
Attachment
Submitted filename: Response to reviewers.docx
Decision Letter - Ramune Jacobsen, Editor

Vitamin D levels of pregnant immigrant women and developmental disorders of language, learning and coordination in offspring

PONE-D-23-33791R1

Dear Dr. Arrhenius,

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,

Ramune Jacobsen

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

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #3: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #4: 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

Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

**********

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: 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

Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: 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

Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: 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: The data provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information. he statistical analysis been performed appropriately. Authors have adequately addressed my comments raised in a previous round of review and I feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication.

Reviewer #2: Authors addressed all the questions. Please, consider paper entitled as Vitamin D levels of pregnant immigrant women and developmental disorders of language, learning and coordination in offspring for publication.

Reviewer #3: Good work done. I think the authors have addressed all the queries which were raised by the reviewers.

Good work done. I think the authors have addressed all the queries which were raised by the reviewers.

Reviewer #4: The author addressed all the comments. They added the figures, changed the paper title and did all the reviewers suggested modifications.

**********

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: Hamada A. Ahmed

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: No

Reviewer #4: No

**********

Formally Accepted
Acceptance Letter - Ramune Jacobsen, Editor

PONE-D-23-33791R1

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Arrhenius,

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. Ramune Jacobsen

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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