Comprehensive Analysis of the Role of Gene Variants in Matrix Metalloproteinases and Their Tissue Inhibitors in Retinopathy of Prematurity: A Study in the Polish Population

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors,

Despite an interesting manuscript you developed there are some minor and major objections from my side:

Major:

1) control group is not described. Please, give clear inclusion/exclusion criteria for this group, too.

2) !! Patients age matters. You have put all the patients/controls in one group, but this doesnt seems very correct. Because there is big difference in eye development between weeks 22 and 32. Thus, the group division in: 26-30, 22-31, 23-31 ans 22-30 is not correct.You have to give insight into the development impact on the aging groups in M+M and Discussion. Additionally, M+M have to contain correct division of patients in accordance to the age weeks, there is a lack of this info now.

3) Conclusions. ! Surprising conclusion about the Caucasian preterm infants. Sorry, but this doesnt respond to you aim and also M+M lacks any info about the division of little patients/controls in the racial groups... Please, correct this accordingly to these remarks!

Minor:

1) Please, give the description of the problem in Poland and topicality to research this question there;

2) please, move the info about the Ethical permissions also in the text and decipher which one permission (office, code, year) is for patients, which one - for controls;

3) finally, revise, please, your references. There are 3 previous century sources (out of 35) and this doesnt fit to the Journal. Remove or replace them.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

In the present work the authors investigated the relationships between SNPs of MMP-1, MMP-9, TIMP-1 and TIMP-2 and the development of retinopathy of prematurity in Caucasian newborn infants (both males and females). In total 100 patients were examined and thorough statistical analysis has been performed. Overall the work was performed at the high standard, except that the number of patients being examined is relatively few. But the authors mention it among the limitations of the study.

There minor issues that can be addressed to improve the manuscript:

1.      Introduction does not provide the sufficient information, why MMP-1 and MMP-9 were chosen for the analysis, as the reviewed literature provides data on MMP-2 and MMP-9.

2.       Lines 111-114 reference to the table is missing in the text

3.      Line 122: Table 2 AND Table 3… Otherwise the text looks incomplete

4.      Table 2 – it is unclear why the first cells are marked with bold font. It should be removed or explained in the legend

5.      Table 3 – explanations for the bold font are missing either

6.      Lines 146 – 156 – the text duplicates the data in Table 3

7.      Line 257-259: “We observed a strong LD between studied MMP-9 rs17576/rs17577 and TIMP- 2572 rs2277698/rs55743137 variants in our population, which was similar to other European populations.” – The reference to the studies in other European populations is missing.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors,

Thank you for the done job. I cant see any reasons more not to advice your manuscript for the publishing.

Have a nice day and many interesting researches!