Review for 10.1186/1471-230X-10-1 (2010)

Reviewer's report
Title:How do patients with inflammatory bowel disease want their biological
therapy administered?
Version: 1Date:6 July 2009
Reviewer: Lesley Martine Roberts
Reviewer's report:
Major compulsory revisions:
1. Having previously reviewed this paper I am disappointed to note that it
remains a poorly presented study with lots of typos and grammatical errors still
throughout the work e.g. Intro line 1: IBD is chronic relapsing and remitting
disorders , Methods line 3: distributed to 125 consecutively patients
2. The authors addressed some (I made 16 comments but only 8 points in the
response so difficult to see exactly which had been acted upon and which not)
points made but overall this was done superficially and the introduction still fails
to place this work within it’s wider context. I suggested the authors consider the
wider literature surrounding patient preference which indicates that length of time
on market and efficacy are more important than mode of administration and may
explain the preferences seen here (for the drug which has been on the market
longest). Failure to contextualise the study more widely make this a very shallow
piece of work which may be misleading to readers who are unfamiliar with wider
literature. The authors talk about the different findings in RA patients but this
really seems to be missing the wider points.
3. The aim of the study is not to investigate how patients want their biological
agent administered but to compare preference for 2 currently available agents.
4. I asked authors for clarification of the sample size – they addressed this in part
in their response but did not give information in the paper and therefore this point
still remains.
5. The survey focussed on patients who had attended the service in 2007 but it
does not state this was a an inclusion criteria – perhaps it would be better to
include this in the identification section as the term ‘focussed’ implies a wider
scope to the study with a point of focus and I think this group were the only group
utilised.
6. The authors in their response clarify that medication data was self reported but
this is still not clear in the text which states medication was recorded (implying
accurate note review). This needs to be clarified.
7. The authors have clarified the nature of the analyses but state they used
SPSS STATA 9 (Statistical Package for Social Services). This is very unclear –
did they use STATA 9 or SPSS (which version?)? The authors should note this is
not a package for Social Services but Social Sciences. The simplicity of analyses
would suggest that only one package was required.
8. In response to reviewers comments tables have been included – these are not
referenced in the text and do not included additional or useful data. The authors
would have been better utilising a large table to describe patient characteristics
thus reducing the length of the initial descriptive paragraphs. Table so this nature
with only a couple of percentages presented are in no way useful.
9. The discussion still suffers from the same issues identified in the intro – it does
not explore the implications of the findings in the wider context in which they are
imbedded.
Level of interest: An article of limited interest
Quality of written English: Acceptable
Statistical review: Yes, but I do not feel adequately qualified to assess the
statistics.
Declaration of competing interests:
I declare that I have no competing interests.