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  • Evangelia Myserli1,*,
  • Ioannis Goulis2 and
  • Asimina Fylaktou3
  • et al.

Reviewer 1: Anonymous Reviewer 2: Anonymous

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Great efforts have been made to identify associations between host immunogenetics and chronic HBV infection. A number of host genetic variants, such as mutations in human leukocyte antigens (HLAs), cytokine and chemokine genes, toll-like receptor (TLRs), have been found to influence the outcome of HBV infection [Zhang et al. Host Genetic Determinants of Hepatitis B Virus Infection. Front Genet. 2019 Aug 13;10:696. doi: 10.3389/fgene.2019.00696; Seshasubramanian et al. Human leukocyte antigen A, B and Hepatitis B infection outcome: A meta-analysis. Infect Genet Evol. 2018 Dec;66:392-398. doi: 10.1016/j.meegid.2017.07.027]. The aim of Myserli et al. manuscript was to study HLA alleles' impact on HVB-infected individuals in a Greek population: 107 patients with chronic HBV infection and 101 with spontaneous clearance. The study showed an association of 9 specific HLA alleles with either susceptibility or protection against chronic HBV infection. Limitations of the study included the small sample size.

Remarks

  1. Table 1 does not indicate the demographic characteristics of the group of healthy subjects.
  2. Since there is a lot of data on the polymorphism of host genes, it is difficult to understand the novelty of the data obtained by the authors. Therefore, it is necessary to clearly write in the Discussion and/or in the Conclusions what new results the authors have shown in their work.
  3. It is probably more correct to compare all 3 groups with each other. It is unclear how healthy people differ from patients with spontaneous hepatitis B clearance, but some HLA alleles' frequencies vary significantly.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This paper provided the HLA allleles' fequencies across chronic HBV infection group, spontaneous HBsAg-negative group and health blood donors.  The major concern is that the cohort of patient is much smaller than the healthy cohort, which may lead to errors in the conclusions.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

All my concerns have been addressed, thanks.