Reviewer's report
Title:Liver fibrosis secondary to bile duct injury: correlation of Smad7 with TGF-b
(beta)and fibrotic proteins
Version: 3Date:28 July 2009
Reviewer: Ralf Weiskirchen
Reviewer's report:
Alatorre-Carranza and co-workers have addressed and comment on most of the
issues that were raised in my initial review. However, I have (still) two further
short comments that should be revised in the final version:
Discretionary Revisions
1. in the headline it must read “extracellular matrix proteins” instead of “matrix
extracellular proteins”
2. In the cover letter the authors state that “… there does not exist any reports in
the literature on polymorphisms in TGF-beta genes and serum levels within the
Mexican population”. However, it was previously shown that there is a potential
link of these polymorphisms to hepatic fibrosis in patients of Mexican ancestry
(see Armendáriz-Borunda et al. J Investig Med. 2008;56:944-953). Moreover the
precise frequencies of some of these polymorphisms can be found in the
HapMap database that also includes gene frequencies of a Mexican ancestry in
Los Angelos. The respective link is:
http://www.hapmap.org/cgi-perl/gbrowse/hapmap27_B36/. Therefore, I would ask
the authors for adding one short critical sentence highlighting the fact that these
results might partially be overlapped by TGF-beta gene polymorphisms that were
not analysed in this study.
Level of interest: An article whose findings are important to those with closely
related research interests
Quality of written English: Acceptable
Statistical review: No, the manuscript does not need to be seen by a
statistician.
Declaration of competing interests:
I declare that I have no competing interests
Reviewer's report
Title:Liver fibrosis secondary to bile duct injury: correlation of Smad7 with TGF-b
(beta)and fibrotic proteins
Version: 3Date:28 July 2009
Reviewer: Ralf Weiskirchen
Reviewer's report:
Alatorre-Carranza and co-workers have addressed and comment on most of the
issues that were raised in my initial review. However, I have (still) two further
short comments that should be revised in the final version:
Discretionary Revisions
1. in the headline it must read “extracellular matrix proteins” instead of “matrix
extracellular proteins”
2. In the cover letter the authors state that “… there does not exist any reports in
the literature on polymorphisms in TGF-beta genes and serum levels within the
Mexican population”. However, it was previously shown that there is a potential
link of these polymorphisms to hepatic fibrosis in patients of Mexican ancestry
(see Armendáriz-Borunda et al. J Investig Med. 2008;56:944-953). Moreover the
precise frequencies of some of these polymorphisms can be found in the
HapMap database that also includes gene frequencies of a Mexican ancestry in
Los Angelos. The respective link is:
http://www.hapmap.org/cgi-perl/gbrowse/hapmap27_B36/. Therefore, I would ask
the authors for adding one short critical sentence highlighting the fact that these
results might partially be overlapped by TGF-beta gene polymorphisms that were
not analysed in this study.
Level of interest: An article whose findings are important to those with closely
related research interests
Quality of written English: Acceptable
Statistical review: No, the manuscript does not need to be seen by a
statistician.
Declaration of competing interests:
I declare that I have no competing interests
Please review this paper.
user
Reviewer's report
Title:Liver fibrosis secondary to bile duct injury: correlation of Smad7 with TGF-b
(beta)and fibrotic proteins
Version: 3Date:28 July 2009
Reviewer: Ralf Weiskirchen
Reviewer's report:
Alatorre-Carranza and co-workers have addressed and comment on most of the
issues that were raised in my initial review. However, I have (still) two further
short comments that should be revised in the final version:
Discretionary Revisions
1. in the headline it must read “extracellular matrix proteins” instead of “matrix
extracellular proteins”
2. In the cover letter the authors state that “… there does not exist any reports in
the literature on polymorphisms in TGF-beta genes and serum levels within the
Mexican population”. However, it was previously shown that there is a potential
link of these polymorphisms to hepatic fibrosis in patients of Mexican ancestry
(see Armendáriz-Borunda et al. J Investig Med. 2008;56:944-953). Moreover the
precise frequencies of some of these polymorphisms can be found in the
HapMap database that also includes gene frequencies of a Mexican ancestry in
Los Angelos. The respective link is:
http://www.hapmap.org/cgi-perl/gbrowse/hapmap27_B36/. Therefore, I would ask
the authors for adding one short critical sentence highlighting the fact that these
results might partially be overlapped by TGF-beta gene polymorphisms that were
not analysed in this study.
Level of interest: An article whose findings are important to those with closely
related research interests
Quality of written English: Acceptable
Statistical review: No, the manuscript does not need to be seen by a
statistician.
Declaration of competing interests:
I declare that I have no competing interests
assistant