Paper 00/3366 – Peer-led asthma education improves quality of life and asthma morbidity in adolescents . . .

Report from the BMJ's full editorial committee meeting

Members of the committee were:
Nicky Britten Trish Groves
Kevin Jones
Tim Lancaster

*Julie Morris (who reported on all the papers but was unable to attend the meeting)

Thank you for sending us this paper. We are pleased to say that we would like to publish it in the BMJ if you are willing to revise it as we suggest.

  1. The reviewer who saw your paper made many detailed comments. We would like you to respond to these (please see enclosed report) in revising your paper.
  2. Our statistician, Julie Morris, made some additional points (see enclosed report).
  3. In addition, the committee made the following points:


    4. a Although we appreciate that quality of life is an important outcome, particularly among teenagers who find asthma difficult to deal with, we were surprised that you did not use a validated measure of asthma morbidity as a secondary outcome. Please explain why this was the case. We wondered whether you had focused on quality of life for this paper because it turned out to be a positive association; was quality of life the main outcome measure when you initially designed the study?

    b Children in the control schools improved quite a bit during the study. Is it possible that there was any contamination ie spread of the intervention between the intervention and control groups?

    c Please provide the Number Needed to Treat, and report this (along with the confidence intervals for the main results) in the abstract of the paper.
     

  4. We do not think that all of our general readers need to see a detailed account of your methodology. Therefore, we would like to publish your paper in two forms – a full version on our website bmj.com and a much shorter version in the printed BMJ. We are beginning to use this dual publication process for increasing numbers of BMJ papers, and the enclosed sheet gives you more information about this ELPS (electronic long, paper short) system. As you will see, we only need from you a revised version of the full paper; we will go ahead and produce the two versions for publication.
  5. The last points relate to our processes:
a If you decide to take up this offer of publication with revision please remember that the paper should not exceed 2000 words (excluding the abstract and reference list) and should have no more than 24 references. Please provide a word count for the final manuscript.

b Please respond to any checklists and guidelines which are enclosed with this paper.

c We are now processing all manuscripts electronically, so please could you provide us with a copy of your article on disk as well as in hard copy. Please see the enclosed guidance about our preferred formats. If you cannot provide one of these please send a disk anyway with a note of the software used.

d It would help us greatly if you would send with your revised paper a covering letter explaining how you have responded to all the points raised in this report.