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All issues indicated by the reviewers were addressed and I am pleased to accept revised manuscript.
[# PeerJ Staff Note - this decision was reviewed and approved by Celine Gallagher, a PeerJ Section Editor covering this Section #]
After the author's revision, this article has been significantly improved. I have no further comments and can consider accepting it for publication
After the author's revision, this article has been significantly improved. I have no further comments and can consider accepting it for publication
Limited innovation
no
Please address the concerns of both reviewers and amend the manuscript accordingly.
**PeerJ Staff Note:** Please ensure that all review, editorial, and staff comments are addressed in a response letter and that any edits or clarifications mentioned in the letter are also inserted into the revised manuscript where appropriate.
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Nather et al. have focused on the Correlation of serum Apolipoprotein B with the Framingham
risk score among a group of Iraqi subjects. This study suggests that apoB may serve as a reliable biomarker for CAD risk assessment in the Iraqi population. The relationship between apoB and frs has been extensively studied and confirmed; The innovation of this article is limited.
I believe several issues need clarification.
Major comments:
1. Please indicate whether your present study was sufficient to support your results. In general, I think it would be appropriate to include a description of statistical power in your study using the QUANTO program or other software in the statistical analysis section.
2. The FRS scoring system already includes blood lipids, and apob belongs to the blood lipid component. On this basis, how to avoid duplicate studies or data impact.
3. Apolipoprotein B/A1 ratio is more meaningful than APOB.
4. What is the follow-up time, and what is the incidence of CAD?
In this manuscript, the authors show results of association analyses between the Framingham risk score and apolipoprotein levels. Although the results are interesting, I feel this manuscript would benefit from some modifications. Besides, authors would gain by highlighting further the novelty their results would bring to the literature. Please, find below some specific comments.
Authors should improve the references section and cite stronger publications.
Line 61: Reference Garg et al., 2024 is not the most appropriate reference.
Line 65: It is not appropriate to use the work done by Hoog et al. (2022) to support their concerns about FRS.
There is indeed only one study which the aim was to study the correlation between apoB and FRS. However, there are several other publications in which results on the correlation between both variables are shown.
Table 1: Authors should add risk significance to the FCS groups.
The authors stated that participants were recruited from individuals attending the laboratory. Authors should give more information regarding the type of clinic associated with this laboratory. Was it a lipid clinic? A cardiology clinic?
Exclusion of participants due to incomplete data can lead to bias. Did the authors check the impacts to exclude 53 participants?
Table 2: Did the authors apply a correction for multiple testing?
Line 210: It is not clear how the cutoff of 97.25 was determined. Besides, considering that clinical cutoffs exist, it would have been interesting to show results using them.
Line 181-differences between men and women were shown for other variables.
Lines 238-230: Some clinical guidelines include apoB in their recommendations.
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