LAUSR

We thank Dr. Kawada for his interest in our paper and for taking the time to express his concerns. Dr. Kawada refers to the statistical method that was used to determine the difference in plasma levels of alpha and gamma synuclein between autism spectrum disorder children (n = 38) and healthy control children (n = 40) [1]. His concern is that the sample size was small to be measured by mean ± SD; he suggests that this should have been measured by log-normal distribution in each indicator, and that the mean ± SD should be changed to median. We appreciate his statistical method, but our data, as mentioned in our paper, was normally distributed, and the sample size is not considered small [2]. So, using mean ± SD in Student’s t test in our study was appropriate. This statistical method was also used in an article similar to ours in sample size and protein of interest which was cited in our paper [3]. Another concern was the range and units of alpha and gamma synuclein in the ELISA kit. We used a purchased kit manufactured by EIAab Science Company (Wuhan, China) because it is one of the few kits with a sensitivity of less than 4 pg/mL for alpha-synuclein and less than 0.22 ng/mL for gamma synuclein, as mentioned in the manufacturer datasheet. This shows that plasma levels of alpha and gamma synuclein in our results were within the detectable range of the kits used in our study. Regarding the units used for both proteins of interest, the alphasynuclein was correctly stated in our paper according to the manufacturer as pg/mL. For gamma synuclein, the first draft sent for the reviewer was ng/mL, which is the correct unit, but this was stated as pg/mL due to human error. We appreciate the insightful concerns.