Title: Prevalence and patterns of premenstrual disorders and possible association with sexual
harassment: A cross-sectional study of young Arab women
Version: 2 Date: 01 Oct 2022
Reviewer's report:
The authors conducted a cross-sectional study to explore the prevalence of pre-menstrual
disorders in Egypt, Jordan and Syria, and the impact of sexual harassment on pre-menstrual
disorders. The detailed description of the research method is very good. Despite the positive
features of the study, there are some considerations to take care before the paper is published.
The following points will summarise my major comments in your paper. I hope these comments
help you further improve your study.
In your "Abstract" section, you mentioned "Both conditions were significantly associated with
obesity and working in medical careers", and in the "Discussion" and "Conclusion" sections,
you also highlighted it. I understand you want to describe which of the participants' demographic
characteristics have the biggest impact on premenstrual disorders. But since your study focused
on the relationship between harassment and pre-menstrual disorders, as shown in your title. I
recommended deleting or rewriting these sentences to prevent readers from wondering about
the aim of your research. But this finding of yours is very interesting. If you want to highlight it,
maybe you could write another paper describing the relationships between obesity, occupation,
and premenstrual disorders you found in more detail.
In the "Participants" part, you mentioned that data was collected from women aged 18-35 years
old. Since other age groups also have the potential risk of premenstrual disorders and sexual
harassment, and you want to show the prevalence of premenstrual disorders in three countries of
the whole women population. I suggested that you add some context about why you chose this
age group here or in your "Introduction" section to prevent the representativeness of the study
sample in the whole population from being questioned.
Although this study used convenience sampling method and online questionnaire, you conducted
sample size calculations to justify the power of your study, which is very good. Since you want
your results "be generalized to the population", as you mentioned in your "Introduction" section.
I'd like to know if your study used any survey weights to account for the different probabilities of
participant selection and avoid sampling bias, especially in the case that you used convenience
sampling method and online questionnaire, and you want to compare the prevalence between
different countries.
There are slight mistakes in the "Results" section, e.g., you may miss a % in this sentence,
"46.6% of them were from Egypt, 21.2 from Jordan and 32.2% from Syria". And it is ok if you
do not capitalize the first letter of "obese" or "obesity".
Overall, the findings of this study are very interesting, I am looking forward to seeing the results
of further studies. For example, you have used some basic statistical analysis in this study. It
would be better if you could use some regression models to further analyse the relative risk and
adjust for some confounders in this relationship.