Relative Efficacy and Safety of Anti-Inflammatory Biologic Agents for Osteoarthritis: A Conventional and Network Meta-Analysis

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Overall, I quite liked the review. 

I believe that a better characterization of the patients is pertinent.

I think it is important in the discussion to better explain which criteria (or set) were used for infliximab to be considered the best treatment for OA?

 

Table 1 needs improvement. there is too much information and reading it becomes tiring and difficult.

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

In this paper, the authors presented the results of a meta-analysis performed to examine the efficacy and safety of anti-inflammatory biologic agents among OA patients. This is a very interesting and up-to-date topic, and the manuscript is clear and well written, presenting detailed described methods and results. I would just advise minor improvements.

Methods: some of the verbs are in the future, consider changing to the past tense.

Results: concerning the sex effects? Was the percentage of women similar in all groups?

Consider discussing this subject.

Figure 2: for the sake of clarity, consider, instead of using numbers, to use the abbreviation of drugs’ name.

Discussion: Although the discussion is well pondered based on the study limitations, and due to these limitations consider rewriting the sentence “Our study found clear evidence that infliximab achieved a greater pain relief than any other biologics or placebo, yet it did not increase AEs”, in particular, consider to remove the expression “clear evidence”.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx