Rectal Prolapse in Laboratory-Housed Macaques: Assessing Prevalence, Risk Factors, and Enhanced Treatment Modality

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I think the paper would have more merit if it described how animals were assessed to ensure there was no history of gi issues (record review, how far back 1 month? 6 months?  Additionally, more information on the number of animals that have been treated with hyoscine butylbromide/metamizole would be helpful - including the number of recurrences post treatment vs those without treatment.

- The article provides a nice review of what little is currently in the literature and adds additional facility specific information from the authors
- I recommended that the authors add additional details about the history of intestinal illness in the article so that the readers will know that their conclusion was well founded.  I also suggested additional details on the number of animals that had been treated should be included to provide some justification for their conclusions
-conclusions are appropriate for a review article with additional details outlined above
-references are appropriate
- photos should be cropped to eliminate background ( exam tables, etc).

Comments on the Quality of English Language

There are several areas where I think the English could be better (tenses, flow, etc) realizing this was likely translated from Dutch.

Author Response

Reviewer 1

Comment: I think the paper would have more merit if it described how animals were assessed to ensure there was no history of gi issues (record review, how far back 1 month? 6 months?  Additionally, more information on the number of animals that have been treated with hyoscine butylbromide/metamizole would be helpful - including the number of recurrences post treatment vs those without treatment.

Answer: Please find a revised version of our review manuscript "Rectal prolapse in laboratory-housed macaques: prevalence, etiology, and enhanced treatment modality" for reconsideration for publication in Laboratories. In preparing this revised version of our manuscript, we would like to thank the two reviewers for their helpful comments in order to improve its overall quality. To this end, we have incorporated all of their suggestions. As requested, the revised manuscript have been marked up using the “Track Changes” function in MS Word so that the editors and reviewers can easily see our changes.

we totally agree and all missing information is added including a Table with all numbers.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This is an interesting paper, of questionable value. I am particularly confused by the origination of the manuscript. The paper was submitted and is organized as a review, but is a retrospective study. Consequently, the manuscript is neither a comprehensive review of the literature nor is it a well organized and communicated study. Given that the authors have study data that they want to share, the paper should be reorganized and submitted as a research paper. There is also a limited amount of literature on rectal prolapse in non-human primates making a review especially difficult. With either redesign/revision the authors should avoid making statements of fact without supporting them with data or literature. The paper is littered with numerous examples of unsupported statements. Given my recommendation for restructuring I will not go through these line by line on this version. One example is statements on the significance of risk factors without an explanation of the statistics performed. 

Comments on the Quality of English Language

There are occasional syntax errors and sentences that would be made clearer with English language review, I would encourage that after the manuscript is revised. See lines 63-65 as an example. 

Author Response

Reviewer 2

Comment: This is an interesting paper, of questionable value. I am particularly confused by the origination of the manuscript. The paper was submitted and is organized as a review, but is a retrospective study. Consequently, the manuscript is neither a comprehensive review of the literature nor is it a well organized and communicated study. Given that the authors have study data that they want to share, the paper should be reorganized and submitted as a research paper. There is also a limited amount of literature on rectal prolapse in non-human primates making a review especially difficult. With either redesign/revision the authors should avoid making statements of fact without supporting them with data or literature. The paper is littered with numerous examples of unsupported statements. Given my recommendation for restructuring I will not go through these line by line on this version. One example is statements on the significance of risk factors without an explanation of the statistics performed. 

Answer: Please find a revised version of our review manuscript "Rectal prolapse in laboratory-housed macaques: prevalence, etiology, and enhanced treatment modality" for reconsideration for publication in Laboratories. In preparing this revised version of our manuscript, we would like to thank the two reviewers for their helpful comments in order to improve its overall quality. To this end, we have incorporated all of their suggestions. As requested, the revised manuscript have been marked up using the “Track Changes” function in MS Word so that the editors and reviewers can easily see our changes.

we understand and fully agree with your criticism and effort was made in reshaping the manuscript as a research paper. We added references to stupport statements, expanded the introduction and material and methods part of our study, following the classical structure of a research paper. In addition, we did grammar editing. We hope it is now clear that the current study not only described for the first time the prevalence of RPs in laboratory-housed macaques, but also advocates for the ancillary administration of hyoscine butylbromide and metamizole, which will increase the welfare of laboratory-housed macaques with rectal prolapses. 

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The authors addressed my concerns and submitted a much stronger paper. It is a little difficult to read given the number of corrections. I did not that the iThenticate reported indicated a number of places where text was copies from sources. These need to be modified further and in a few instances, cited correctly. Please make sure the final version is free of any excessive text copying.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

thank your very much for your comments. We edited the manuscript including correct citations as suggested.

Warm regards,

jaco

Round 3

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thank you for addressing my recent comments. Be careful using sections of papers from previous publications by Jaco Bakker, especially when these are copied word for word.