Review for 10.1186/1471-230X-14-183 (2014)

Reviewer's report
Title:Improving compliance to colorectal cancer screening using blood and stool
based tests in patients refusing screening colonoscopy in Germany.
Version:3Date:9 July 2014
Reviewer: Lina Jansen
Reviewer's report:
I would like to thank the authors for the implementation of the suggestions of the
reviewers. The description of the methods and the discussion of the results
improved considerably. In my opinion, the main limitation of the study still is the
representativeness of the study population which is crucial to generalize the
results. However, this limitation is now explicitly discussed in the manuscript.
Minor Essential Revisions
Page 5; Methods, Para 1: Change „Berlin, DE“ to Berlin (Germany)
Page 5; Methods, Para 2: Introduce the abbreviation “FIT”.
Page 5; Methods, Para 3: “Fecal occult blood test” was written, but the
abbreviation FOBT has been introduced before.
Page 7, Results, Para 1: Change “Table 4, Simplified parameters” to “Table 4”.
Page 7, Results, Para 1: Do you mean “after adjustment for age” when you write
“When further analyzed with age factored in”?
Page 8, Discussion, Para 1: Abbreviation CRC was not introduced. Please write
“colorectal cancer”.
Page 8, Discussion, Para 2: Add reference for “the overall reported rate for the
German population (~25%).”
Page 9, Discussion, Para 3: I would suggest to use commas instead of
semicolons in the last sentence.
Page 11, Discussion: “However, the study did not include a mechanism to record
the total number of subjects asked to participate, or the number who refused to
participate.” Please remove the comma before “or”.
Page 18, Table 1: Please introduce the abbreviation “CI” as note. Please delete
the second “%” in “98% CI %”. Please write 50-60 instead of 60. Please avoid the
abbreviations, like Prof. and Univ.. They are also not explained.
Page 19, Table 2: Please introduce the abbreviation “CI” as note. Please write
“95% CI” like in Table 1. Do not use the abbreviation “Alcohol Cons.”.
Page 20, Table 3: Please introduce the abbreviation “CRC” or write "colorectal
cancer". "Prior experience with any form to cancer" instead of "Prior Experience
with any form of Cancer".
Page 21, Table 4: The wording “simplified categories” is unusual. I would suggest
using “collapsed categories”. In general, I would suggest adding the information
of Table 4 to the Table 1 and Supplementary Table 1. Otherwise, the reader
does not know what the levels of the groups are. Furthermore, information on the
analyzed outcome (“refusing colonoscopy”) is missing in the Table
.
Supplemental Information, patient recruitment: Please check for consistence with
respect to terms/abbreviations (“immunological FOB test” vs. FIT vs. iFOBT).
Supplemental Information, patient recruitment: „immunological FOB test ( Hb“
delete the space before “Hb”.
Supplemental Table S12: The “*” is not explained. Please introduce the
abbreviation “CI” as note. Please delete the second “%” in “98% CI %”. Please
write “Profession” instead of “Prof.”. Please write “Alcohol consumption” instead
of “Alcohol Cons.”.
Table S-10: What does “?” mean?
Discretionary Revisions
Page 8, Results, Para 2: Due to the small sample size, supplementary Tables
10-12 could be removed.
Level of interest: An article whose findings are important to those with closely
related research interests
Quality of written English: Needs some language corrections before being
published
Statistical review: No, the manuscript does not need to be seen by a statistician.
Declaration of competing interests:
I declare that I have no competing interests.