The Role of Leptin in Fetal Growth during Pre-Eclampsia

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Well written generic overview of the subject. 

Kind regards

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 1,

Thank-you for reviewing our article and providing us with your comments. Like you, we feel that this review gives a good overview of the field and provides the reader with a comprehensive evaluation of leptin’s role on fetal growth in pre-eclampsia. Furthermore, this article provides a status of where we are now in our current understanding of the topic and provides suggestions on how to move forward to advance the field.

We feel that our article is a good fit for IJMS’s special issue ‘Leptin – Metabolic Programming and Its Endocrine Signals’ and will provide a platform to showcase leptin’s role in fetal development and intrauterine growth.

Reviewer 2 Report

The topic is interested. The authors could have performed a meta-analysis, which would be more solid evidence for the article. Maybe this is an idea for the future.

The references are numerous, and I cannot verify the relevance of all of them in this medium sized article. Maybe the authors could filter better them, and put there the 40-50 relevant?

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 2,

Thank-you for reviewing our article and providing us with your input to improve the manuscript. This article provides a solid basis knowledge of leptin’s role on fetal growth in pre-eclampsia as well as a status of where we are in the field right now. As you rightly say, the work in the article can be expanded on by performing a systematic review with meta-analysis and most certainly is the next step to advance our knowledge on the topic. 

We agree that the reference list may be too detailed. It was our intention to provide a full overview of the current literature to the reader. However, we have taken the advice of Reviewer 2 to heart and have scrutinized the references in order to provide a more concise reference list. We have succeeded in removing 49 (30%) references from the article, leaving a total of 113 in the reference list. We find that the article is significantly improved by this as it is easier to use for readers seeking the background for the statements given in the paper. We do consider it important to reference the relevant papers in this very complex topic, actually comprising three topics, i.e. leptin, fetal growth and pre-eclampsia, so it will be difficult to make further reductions without compromising the quality of the article or its central message. We hope that the changes made are sufficient despite us not being able to condense the reference list further without making major changes to the article.