Epidural Injection Method for Long-Term Pain Management in Rats with Spinal Stenosis

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript written by Hong et al., is well organized and explains rationale, methods as well as results clearly. Hong et al., developed a standardized method for long-term epidural injections for evaluating the efficacy and safety of drugs in rats with lumbar spinal stenosis.  Methods, results, and figures are described in detail and easy to follow. In the Discussion section, authors have compared their method with existing methods of epidural injections and demonstrated the efficacy of their novel method established herein. The conclusion of the study is well supported by data presented in the manuscript.

Author Response

Many thanks, We highly appreciate the effort and time devoted by reviewer while evaluating this manuscript

Reviewer 2 Report

Thank you for permitting me to review this manuscript 

In this animal study authors described a new technique of long duration  epidural catheter delivery used in rats 

LINE 67-71 , these sentences are speculation and should be stated in discussion only 

  2.4  line 110 please add a  legend  for picture of confirmation of epidural catheter insertion figure 5A ,? 

Since the authors state themselves  that this sytem may be useful only for rats , this should also be stated in the title , therefore the discussion should more focus on rats especially in the introduction 

Please describe why the drug delivery in C2 is important as I understand this is for the rats not touching it with their arms , this may be stated before in the method section and not in the discussion section in order to  better understand the purpose 

did the authors checked the absence of leak after device implementation 

If the authors project the use of this system later in humans they should state it specifically  in the discussion 

 

Author Response

Many thanks, We highly appreciate the effort and time devoted by reviewer while evaluating this manuscript

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

The method is well-described. The authors should acknowledge it may be technically challenging and may not be reproducible in all laboratories.

Author Response

Many thanks, We highly appreciate the effort and time devoted by reviewers while evaluating this manuscript. As advised by the reviewer, the novel long-term epidural injection method proposed by us was confined to rats as a research background in the introduction section