Left Ventricular Non-Compaction Spectrum in Adults and Children: From a Morphological Trait to a Structural Muscular Disease

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you for allowing me to review the article titled "Left Ventricular Non-Compaction Spectrum in Adults and Children: from a Morphological Trait to a Structural Muscular Disease" by Fusco et al.

The authors make a significant review and contribute extensively on the available literature especially on the congenital/familial LVNC.

However, in the discussion on acquired form, where the authors discuss pregnancy, CRF and other afterload conditions including athletes heart, there is no mention of any other CHDs that can cause increased after load and whether there are any reports of LVNC in single ventricle populations. Although the authors discuss CHD briefly, the prevalence of 27 to 62% seem rather high

Also, more reports on isolated right ventricle non-compaction and biventricular non-compaction might be interesting to report including causation mechanisms

 

Author Response

We thank the Reviewer for his/her valuable comment. 

We have included the suggested references in the text.

Reviewer 2 Report

Authors do not include a dedicated software tool for the automatic quantification and exact hyper-trabeculation degree of LVNC based on automatic delineation of the epicardial and endocardial borders of the LV and trabecular recesses. At least, some of the following references must be included and commented in Section 9 and Table 1.

G. Bernabé, J. D. Casanova, J. Cuenca y J. González-Carrillo. A self-optimized software tool for quantifying the degree of left ventricle hyper-trabeculation”, Journal of Supercomputing, Vol. 75 (3), pp. 1625-1640, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-018-2722-x

J D Casanova, J González-Carrillo, J Martín, J Cuenca, C Muñoz, M Siguero, R Escribá, E Burillo, J L de la Pompa, A Raya, J R Gimeno, M Sabater and G Bernabé García. Trabeculated Myocardium in Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy: Clinical Consequences. Journal of Clinical Medicine. 2020, 9(10), 3171; https://doi.org/10.3390/jcm9103171   G Bernabé, JD Casanova, J González-Carrillo, JR Gimeno-Blanes. Towards an Enhanced Tool for Quantifying the Degree of LV Hyper-Trabeculation”. Journal of Clinical Medicine. 2021; 10(3):503. https://doi.org/10.3390/jcm10030503. https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0383/10/3/503.  

Author Response

1. Reviewer:

"Thank you for allowing me to review the article titled "Left Ventricular Non-Compaction Spectrum in Adults and Children: from a Morphological Trait to a Structural Muscular Disease" by Fusco et al.

The authors make a significant review and contribute extensively on the available literature especially on the congenital/familial LVNC."

 

Reply: We thank the Reviewer for his/her positive feedback on our manuscript

 

 

2. Reviewer: "However, in the discussion on acquired form, where the authors discuss pregnancy, CRF and other afterload conditions including athletes heart, there is no mention of any other CHDs that can cause increased after load and whether there are any reports of LVNC in single ventricle populations. Although the authors discuss CHD briefly, the prevalence of 27 to 62% seem rather high"

Reply: We thank the Reviewer for his/suggestion and we have briefly mentioned congenital heart disease in the paragraph on acquired LVNC. However, a more detailed description on this important association is reported in the dedicated section.

 

3. Reviewer: "Also, more reports on isolated right ventricle non-compaction and biventricular non-compaction might be interesting to report including causation mechanisms"

Reply: We are grateful to the Reviewer for his/her interesting comment. We have included more reports of those entities with some examples of their pathogenesis and clinical phenotype. 

Reviewer 3 Report

LVNC is an extremely heterogeneous disorder, with the same morphological trait of LV. The authors summarized the morphological features and pathogenesis, etiology, classification, epidemiology, clinical presentations, diagnosis and treatment of LVNC. My comments are: 1. The format of references should be unified. 2. Figure 6 is redundant.

Author Response

We thank the Reviewer for his/her comment.

We have unified the reference format and removed Figure 6, as suggested