Analyzing Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia: A Markov Chain Approach with Hypertensive Patients and Arachnophobic Individuals

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

In this manuscript, Erica Elizabeth Rodriguez-Torres et. al. have used Markov chain modeling approach to analyze sinus respiratory arrhythmia in hypertensive and arachnophobic patients. With this approach, it's easier to scrutinize Sinus respiratory arrhythmia (SRA) dynamics across diverse cohorts, to understand the underlying patterns and mechanisms. Authors found a significant disparity between hypertensive and normotensive participant as well as spider-fearful individuals by applying Markov chain modeling to confront their fear. Manuscript is clearly written and its easy to follow.

I don't have any minor or major concerns for this manuscript.

Author Response

We greatly appreciate the valuable time and effort spent reviewing our contribution, "Analyzing Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia: A Markov Chain Approach with Hypertensive Patients and Arachnophobic Individuals."

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Comments on the Quality of English Language

minor English revision

Author Response

We appreciate the valuable comments made by the reviewer and the editor for our contribution “Analyzing Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia: A Markov chain approach with hypertensive patients and arachnophobic individuals” and we offer (attached report)  a point-by-point description of the corrections made to the manuscript.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

An interesting take on investigating respiratory sinus arrhythmia with arachnophobic individuals. Suggestions and recommendations below:

- Include an explanation of why individuals with arachnophobia were chosen.

- Emphasise what value this research/study has. How are these findings different/support what is already observed in the literature. 

- The 'Materials and Methods' section is lacking. There is confusion about what group was what and why they were selected. These groups also need to be described demoggraphically (i.e., average age, how many there were, etc). It is hard to understand if all individuals were arachnophobic of if there were arachnophobic individuals and then normal individuals, and the normal individuals included both normotensives and hypertensives. Did all participants follow the exact same protocol. It may prove beneficial to consider making admendments to the the sub-headings in this section to address these issues. Need to explain what the 'motor pseudo-biofeedback task' was. 

- Line 181, please quantify how long a "sufficiently long time interval" is. 

- Referring to figure 1 and 2, I would suggest using astericks (*, **, or ***) to denote the degree of statistical difference. Then in the figure caption (for example) you can define that * represents p<0.05, ** represents p<0.001, *** p<0.0001. 

- On lines 281/282 authors mention the expected confounding factor with arachnophobic individuals. Suggest expanding a little more on this. 

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Well written, with only a few minor points.

Firstly, the conventional wording is NOT sinus respiratory arrhythmia (SRA). The correct wording is Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia (RSA). Changing this should also improve the visibility of the paper in search engines! 

Authors interchange between the term "arachnophobic" and "spider-fearful groups". Recommend using arachnophobic for consistency. 

Secondly, in the abstract (line 2) and introduction (line 17) the authors refer to investigating respiratory sinus arrhythmia in the context of heart muscle. Seeing as during no point the cardiac muscle is actually being investigated in this study nor many others, it would be better to change the wording to something along the lines of "investigating RSA with respect to cardiac function". 

Line 226, unnecessary capitalisation of "Statistically".

Lastly, Table 2, "Hypertensive" is mispelt in the SD header.

Author Response

We appreciate the valuable comments made by the reviewer and the editor for our contribution “Analyzing Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia: A Markov chain approach with hypertensive patients and arachnophobic individuals” and we offer (attached report)  a point-by-point description of the corrections made to the manuscript.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Row 357 discusssion section - correct the preposition - such as the based 

The corrections made enhanced the clarity of your work. 

 

Comments on the Quality of English Language

no issues detected

Author Response

We appreciate the comments made by the reviewer  for our contribution “Analyzing Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia: A Markov chain approach with hypertensive patients and arachnophobic individuals” and below we offer a point-by-point description of the corrections made to the manuscript.

Reviewer 2

Row 357 discussion section - correct the preposition - such as the based.

Replay:
To improve text clarity and readability, line 357 has been reworded as follows: “novel methodologies such as those based on the Complex Correlation Measure (CCM),” solving this issue.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf